


Bottom of the River

by bedlamsbard



Series: Oxygen and Rust [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Republic (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Gen, Genderfuck, Murder Mystery, Original Character(s), Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2017-12-29 03:44:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 44,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1000473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bedlamsbard/pseuds/bedlamsbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Murder, mayhem, and mistaken identity!  When a body turns up in Coruscant's underworld with a very familiar face, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker are dispatched to investigate the case.  Newly returned from the front lines of the Clone Wars, the two Jedi find themselves in a deadly game of cat and mouse: but are they the hunters or the hunted?</p>
<p>(Part of the Oxygen & Rust female!Obi-Wan series.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic uses the Star Wars: Clone Wars (or Star Wars: Republic) comics timeline, rather than the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series timeline. It takes roughly sixteen months after the Battle of Geonosis (the events of _Attack of the Clones_ ) and immediately follows the "No Man's Land" arc in the Star Wars: Republic comics. Although it directly deals with the fallout from the "Last Stand on Jabiim", "Hate and Fear", and "No Man's Land" arcs, I have attempted to explain these events in-text for those that are only familiar with the PT movies.
> 
> In the Oxygen & Rust timeline, this fic takes place five and a half years after [Bad Moon Rising](http://archiveofourown.org/works/368762/) and immediately precedes [Dirt in the Machine](http://archiveofourown.org/works/345261).

On another night, the blasterfire on Level 782 might have gone unnoticed. The neighborhood lay deep beneath the planet’s surface, on the edges of a sector dominated by a crime syndicate commonly known as Crimson Arrow. Rumor was that even the Coruscant Security Force didn’t even venture into the sector – a rumor that had been proven false several hours earlier, when the CSF had raided a spice processing warehouse owned by one of Crimson Arrow’s rivals. They were still there when blaster shots rang out a few streets over.

Officers, including one Duros lieutenant and two clone troopers on temporary assignment, were on the scene within minutes. By then the shooter was gone, leaving behind a woman lying face down on the pavement. The blaster bolts in her body – two in the back, one in the neck – were still smoking as the lieutenant reached out to turn her over.

There was no pulse when he checked for it – first, from long training, under the right collarbone, where it would have been on a Duros, and when he saw that she was human, against her neck. The result was the same in both places. He glanced up to see if the clones had returned, then back down at the dead woman.

Lieutenant De Raaha had spent enough time on the force to have gotten fairly good at judging most common species. This woman – human, or close enough that it was no matter – seemed to be in her early thirties, with short red hair and blue eyes that stared blankly at the looming shadows of the buildings above them. Beneath her cloak, the fabric of her clothes was well-made – too good for a woman walking alone on Level 782. Only someone well-armed would be daring enough to parade that kind of finery, and a quick inspection proved that if the dead woman had been carrying, her attacker had removed her weapon before fleeing.

Bootsteps heralded the return of the two clones, who peered over De Raaha’s shoulder at the dead woman.

“Hey,” said Bash, taking off his helmet and tucking it under his arm. “I’ve seen her before.”

“She’s not some squeeze of Hrado’s, is she?” said Lieutenant De Raaha, reaching for his comlink to call the body wagon. “That’s all we need, on top of this Emerald Star kark.”

Bash studied the woman’s face. Like all the other clone troopers, neither he nor his current partner, Teff, had been specially trained for law enforcement, but the continuation of the Clone Wars had seen a great many things change in the Republic, even here on Coruscant, far from the front. While some in the CSF had protested clone involvement, claiming that the police force was meant to be impartial, De Raaha didn’t mind the extra help. Bash and Teff, as well as their brothers back at the sector nick, were smart lads who were quick to learn, if sometimes a little blunt-headed about the meaning of “innocent until proven guilty.”

Teff took off his helmet too. While Bash had shaved his head bald, tattooing gently swooping lines that he said had been painted on the nose of his gunship on either side of his skull, Teff had let his hair grown long enough to tie into a knot at the back of his skull. Although he would never have admitted it, De Raaha was glad that they had done so; it made it easier to tell the two clones apart. Most of the other clones he knew had done something similar, though they were all the same once they put the armor on.

Bash and Teff looked at each other. “It can’t be,” Teff said. “I heard she was KIA on Jabiim.”

“I heard that she was back,” Bash argued. “False alarm.”

Teff put his head to the side, studying the woman’s face. De Raaha looked over his shoulder for the police droids and the body wagon. He preferred organics for investigative work, but there was no denying that police droids were useful for the everyday wear-and-tear of police work.

“I saw her on Geonosis,” Teff said definitively. “She and her apprentice and that senator were on my gunship when they were evacuated.”

“So I’m right, aren’t I? It is her?”

“Then where’s her lightsaber, huh? When was the last time you saw a Jedi wandering around without her lightsaber? She’s not dressed like a Jedi, either.”

De Raaha’s heart sank. If their vic was a Jedi, that meant that this case was no longer in CSF’s jurisdiction – not that they had much of one, down here in Crimson Arrow’s territory, but he was willing to argue it for justice’s sake. “You lads want to share with the class?” he asked. “Not all of us did a tour on the front.”

All three of them looked down at the dead woman. At this point, even De Raaha was willing to admit that there seemed to be something familiar about her, although maybe it was just continued exposure.

Bash and Teff exchanged another of those wordless glances, as if they were conferring between themselves. It had been made clear to De Raaha that despite rumor, the clone troopers the Republic had purchased from Kamino didn’t have a hive mind, but sometimes it certainly seemed like it.

“We think she’s a Jedi Knight,” Bash said.

Lieutenant De Raaha nodded, setting his sharp teeth against his bottom lip. “Well, that’s just great,” he said. “Just great. Any Jedi Knight in particular?”

If Bash and Teff had recognized her, that meant that she was probably one of the famous ones, the ones who had been making the HoloNet for the past few months. On the other hand, it might have just meant that they had served with her at some point; there were a lot of Jedi who had been on Geonosis that weren’t household names.

“Yeah,” Teff said. “General Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

*

Anakin Skywalker concentrated on the floor in front of his nose as he heaved himself up into another push-up, trying not to listen to the smack of flesh on synthleather in the other room. In his experience, it was a bad sign when his Master was too emotionally fraught even to meditate – and the Force knew that she had been trying; Anakin had woken up to find her in the same cross-legged posture that she had been in when he had gone to bed the night before. He had slept through the same confused mess of visions, memories, and nightmares that he had been having for the past month – half his, half hers. If her dreams were anything like his, then it was no wonder that she hadn’t slept properly since he and Ki-Adi-Mundi had found her on Riflor three days ago.

It had taken them that long to get back to Coruscant. While there had been no question of Anakin staying with Ki-Adi-Mundi once Obi-Wan and Alpha had been recovered – Anakin would have liked to see them _try_ – the war effort couldn’t spare the _Reliant_ to take them back to Coruscant, where they had been ordered by the Jedi Council. If Obi-Wan had been cleared to pilot by the medical droids on the _Reliant_ or the battle cruiser had been able to spare a small transport, they could have gotten back on their own, but as it was they had had to spend several standard days hopping between ships and planets in Republic space until they could book seats on a civilian freighter heading to Coruscant.

Anakin shut his eyes, sweat dripping down his nose as he started another rep. His shoulders ached – he had been at this for the better part of an hour now – and his right arm was starting to chafe where his prosthetic arm met flesh. If he had any sense, he would stop – but if he stopped, then he wouldn’t have anything to think about except the sound of flesh on synthleather as Obi-Wan steadily beat the stuffing out of the punching bag in the other room, just like _she_ had been doing for the better part of an hour.

A quick flurry of blows told him that she had changed tactics, hammering quick punches into the punching bag, occasionally punctuated by a kick. The medical droids on the _Reliant_ had said that she was out of shape and malnourished from her captivity, that she should take it easy for the next few weeks, but it was clear that Obi-Wan hadn’t taken any notice of that advice. Anakin wasn’t exactly sanguine about his own chances in that regard.

He didn’t want to reach out mentally in case he distracted her, but also because he was afraid to do so and fail. Their Master-Padawan bond had always been – _odd_ , was how one of his old training masters at the Temple had told him once, frowning as if it was a personal insult to the Order. It certainly hadn’t been meant as a compliment. Anakin hadn’t much cared at the time, since even if it was wrong, it was the only way that he knew how to be a Padawan. He knew that it had worried Obi-Wan, but she had never spoken of it to him. It had been fine. Good. Great, even, once the Clone Wars had started, because the more closely attuned to each other a pair of Jedi were, the better they fought. Anakin and Obi-Wan had spent so much time in each other’s heads that their thoughts had started bleeding together. No one had really known how to deploy Jedi back then, since Jedi hadn’t had to fight real wars in centuries, and as a result they had spent more time on the battlefield than off it, leaving themselves open to the Force so as to have every possible advantage against the Confederacy’s droid armies. Anakin had always had trouble keeping himself closed off from Obi-Wan; it had gotten even harder when they had had to spend hours – sometimes days – with the bond between them as open as they could comfortably make it.

Then had come Jabiim.

Even now, a month afterwards, Anakin could barely think about the ugly, bloody, _failed_ Battle of Jabiim. Twenty-seven Jedi had died on the planet’s rain-soaked surface, and it had very nearly been twenty-eight. If Dooku’s pet assassin Asajj Ventress hadn’t rescued – _ha!_ – Obi-Wan for her own vile purposes, it would have been twenty-eight. As it was, Anakin had spent three weeks thinking that Obi-Wan was dead and Obi-Wan had spent three weeks being chained up in Ventress’s dungeon, being tortured for intel. If Obi-Wan hadn’t managed to escape along with Alpha, the clone commander Ventress had captured along with her, then Anakin would still think that she was dead.

Stars’ bane, she probably _would_ be dead.

He let himself collapse to the floor at the end of that last push-up. From the sound of it, Obi-Wan’s attack on the punching bag was growing more erratic; she was probably as tired as Anakin was, if not more so, since captivity and torture weren’t exactly favorable to continued good health. There was a reason that the Jedi Healers hadn’t cleared her to return to active duty yet, despite Obi-Wan’s frequent complaints on the subject.

The sound of beeping made Anakin roll smoothly to his feet, grabbing his comlink off his nightstand. “This is Commander Skywalker,” he said, keying it on.

“This is Master K’Kruhk,” said the older Jedi, faintly rebuking. Anakin took the hint; military rank had no place in the Temple.

“Sorry, Master. Force of habit.”

K’Kruhk took the apology gracefully. “Is Obi-Wan with you? She hasn’t been reissued a comlink yet and your holocomm isn’t connecting.”

“It’s broken,” Anakin said. He fought down the spike of worry that K’Kruhk’s question had triggered, since he hadn’t actually _seen_ Obi-Wan in the past hour, but the idea that she had left the suite without his noticing was patently absurd. Besides, he’d heard her; the sound of a mouse droid running into a wall over and over again, the next most likely explanation, was entirely different from that of a woman beating a synthleather punching bag.

He flicked his fingers at his bedroom door to open it as he walked out into the common room, just in time to see Obi-Wan spin a roundhouse kick into the punching bag and send it swinging wildly from its hook. She caught it and steadied it as he emerged, a thread of curiosity passing between them in the Force.

Anakin felt his shoulders slump in relief as he felt it. Their connection had been sporadic at best since they had been reunited on Riflor. At worst, they were Forceblind to each other, the way they had been that first year of his apprenticeship, during which Obi-Wan had later confessed to him that the Council had seriously considered separating them because of their apparent incompatibility. On the opposite end of that, they were constantly in each other’s heads again, which Anakin quietly thought would have been preferable if it didn’t make it all that much more likely that Obi-Wan would find out some of the things he had done when he had thought that she was dead.

“She’s here, Master K’Kruhk,” Anakin said into the comlink, then tossed it to Obi-Wan.

She plucked it out of the air, stepping away from the punching bag as she said, “This is Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Anakin didn’t hear K’Kruhk’s response. He leaned against the doorframe, taking Obi-Wan’s distraction as an opportunity to study his Master. She had lost weight and muscle mass during her captivity on Rattatak, so that, stripped down as she was to light workout pants and a long-sleeved undershirt that covered the bacta bandages on her wrists, she looked almost skeletally slim, her bones standing out sharply beneath skin that had paled in Ventress’s dungeon. Alpha had cut her previously waist-length hair back to her shoulders while they had been on the run, which somehow seemed even worse to Anakin than the scars left by Ventress’s interrogations. Obi-Wan had loved her long hair. It had been her one real point of vanity – or at least the most obvious one, anyway. It was still long enough that Obi-Wan had pulled it back into a tail at the back of her skull for her workout, now tinted dark with sweat, which Anakin privately found rather a relief. If Alpha had cut it as short as Senator Mon Mothma wore hers, it would have felt too much like an amputation.

He glanced down at his prosthetic hand, gleaming in the artificial light. A different kind of amputation, anyway.

Obi-Wan glanced up at him; Anakin looked down rather than meet her eyes. He could still feel the bond between them, but now it felt faint and distant, stretched out over half a galaxy. “We’ll be down shortly, Master K’Kruhk,” she said into the comlink before keying it off and tossing it back to Anakin.

He caught it. “Do we have an assignment, Master?”

Obi-Wan pulled the tie out of her hair and shook it loose, combing it straight with her fingers. “I’m not really sure, but there’s a CSF lieutenant downstairs asking for me.”

“Well, I’m sure you didn’t do it, whatever it was,” Anakin said.

“Your faith in me is reassuring, my young Padawan,” Obi-Wan said, slipping the tie over her wrist. “Let’s meet back here in five minutes, since neither of us is currently fit for polite company.”

“You look beautiful,” Anakin blurted out, and promptly wanted to eat his own lightsaber blade first.

Obi-Wan blinked. “That’s very flattering, Padawan, but I think I’d prefer to put on proper robes anyway. And you probably want to put on a shirt.”

“Um,” Anakin said, glancing down at his sweat-slicked bare chest. “You might have a point.”

Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow, then shrugged and stepped into her room. Anakin ducked back into his bedroom, dressing quickly and clipping his lightsaber to his belt. When he reemerged, Obi-Wan was waiting for him, now fully dressed in robes and looking every inch the proper Jedi Knight. She had even managed to braid her hair in the short amount of time she had allotted, pinning it into a coil at the back of her head.

The familiar halls of the Temple seemed unnervingly empty around Anakin as he and Obi-Wan made their way downstairs. With every able Knight and Master who wasn’t philosophically opposed to the war deployed offworld, most of the remaining residents of the Temple were children and convalescents. Even the majority of the healers had gone, scattered at various medical stations across the galaxy, leaving only a handful behind to tend to Jedi medevaced back to Coruscant.

Anakin hated it. He hadn’t been raised in the Temple the way most Jedi had, but he had spent most of his life here nonetheless. There was a particular type of energy that formed in the Force around a large number of Jedi; Anakin suspected that the same might be true of a large group of Sith, but fortunately that was an infestation that the galaxy was no longer plagued by, Count Dooku’s handful of Dark Acolytes aside. That energy wasn’t _absent_ from the Temple, not exactly – there were still several hundred Jedi here, even if they were mostly younglings and Padawans whose Masters had been killed in combat – but it was definitely muted from what it had been before the war, as if a heavy cloth had been dropped over the entire complex. It made his skin crawl.

He couldn’t sense any of Obi-Wan’s thoughts right now – _blast it_ – but he risked a quick glance at her face. To a stranger, she probably looked quietly introspective, but to Anakin she just looked uncomfortable, a little small and lost in clothes that had fit her like a glove before her captivity. It reminded him too much of how she had looked those first few years after Qui-Gon’s death, before she had settled into her new role as a Knight-Master with a Padawan.

If Anakin ever got his hands on Asajj Ventress, he’d wring her pale neck.

At this thought, Obi-Wan glanced sharply at him. Anakin swallowed, trying to prepare a verbal defense, but eventually Obi-Wan looked away again without remarking on it. Her mental shields were up, making it impossible for him to get a read on what she was thinking – at least until the next time their bond fluctuated and they ended up in each other’s heads without any way of disentangling themselves.

Master K’Kruhk and the CSF lieutenant, a Duros male, were waiting in the entrance hall. The lieutenant had come accompanied by two clone troopers in full armor, both of whom wore the arm-patches that marked them as having been seconded to the Coruscant Security Force. Obi-Wan’s pace quickened as she caught sight of them, striding purposefully down the otherwise empty corridor.

“Lieutenant De Raaha?” she said. “I’m Obi-Wan Kenobi; this is my Padawan learner, Anakin Skywalker.”

“Hi,” Anakin said, looking the Duros up and down. From Anakin’s brief and automatic mental scan, skipping quickly across the surface of his mind, he seemed like an upright sort of guy. The clones were a known quantity; there was more variation among them than they were given credit for, but these two seemed familiar enough. Not ARC troopers or commandos, but they didn’t have to be for their current assignment.

Obi-Wan nodded to K’Kruhk, who returned the greeting. The Whiphid Jedi Master’s apparent good health was misleading, since Anakin knew that despite his current tenure as Temple gatekeeper he was still recovering from injuries sustained while failing to foil the assassination of Senator Viento.

The Duros lieutenant studied Obi-Wan with an intensity that Anakin found mildly disturbing. “I’m afraid that I have to ask for a genetic sample, General Kenobi,” he said at last, pulling a scanner out of his pocket.

All three Jedi stiffened, but it was Anakin who snapped, “Why?”

He heard the Force compulsion in his voice too late, as Obi-Wan and K’Kruhk both swung around to frown disapprovingly at him. De Raaha, who hadn’t been expecting the mind trick and thus had no defense against it, was already talking, though.

“There’s been a murder down in the lower city,” he said. “The genetic match came up to a coded ID – two, actually – but my associates here,” he indicated the two clone troopers, “made a visual ID to you, General.”

“Well, I’m clearly not dead,” Obi-Wan said, sounding much calmer than Anakin felt at the mention of her death, hypothetical as it had to be. She held her hand out for the scanner, pressing her thumb against the thin needle that slid out. Even though he couldn’t see it, Anakin winced; he didn’t like needles and he had felt the sharp sting in his own thumb, even though he shouldn’t have been able to – it would, after all, have been his prosthetic hand if their positions had been reversed.

Lieutenant De Raaha took the scanner back. It hummed a little as it cycled up; it couldn’t put a name to a coded ID, as all Jedi were, but it could certainly check to see if Obi-Wan’s genetic sequence matched anyone else in the CSF computer system.

“Who was the other ID?” Anakin asked. “You said there were two genetic matches, both coded. What was the other one designated?”

“Senatorial,” said the lieutenant, his red eyes fixed on the scanner. They widened slightly as the scanner pinged, announcing its results. “This doesn’t make any sense!”

Anakin took the device out of his hand without asking, frowning down at the display. Obi-Wan’s blood sample had come up with a genetic match, all right – one to the corpse, currently designated L782-X23, one to a coded ID with a Jedi designation, and one to a coded ID with a senatorial designation. Anakin showed it to Obi-Wan. “Master?”

Obi-Wan took the scanner from him, punching in her Jedi ID. “My Padawan and I were offworld until last night,” she said. “If your murder occurred any earlier than about eight o’clock, then I’m afraid that we didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“What would you say, Bash, about dinner time?” De Raaha said, directing this question to one of the clones.

Obi-Wan apparently didn’t hear him. Her expression had turned into a frown. “You’re not entirely mistaken, Lieutenant,” she said. “That is a genetic match.”

“What?” Anakin said.

“But I’m afraid that it’s not me that you want to speak to,” Obi-Wan went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “It’s Senator Mon Mothma of Chandrila. Your murder victim must be from her retinue, although I’m not personally familiar with this woman.”

“What?” Anakin repeated. “Master, what are you talking about? That’s – not you, is it? I mean, of course it isn’t,” he corrected himself, resisting the urge to grab at Obi-Wan and reassure himself that she was really there; she wasn’t some vision that the Force had conjured up to torment him.

“I assume that you have a hologram of the body?” Obi-Wan asked De Raaha. Her mind touched Anakin’s lightly; although there was an undertone of tightly controlled agitation, her mental voice was otherwise as calm as her physical one.

“I do,” the lieutenant said reluctantly. One hand went to his pocket, but he hesitated, obviously reluctant to show it to someone he thought might be connected to the murder.

“Let’s see it,” said Master K’Kruhk, with just a hint of compulsion in his voice. By now, he was obviously interested – well, he would be; the gatekeepers were at least partially responsible for any Jedi on Coruscant.

Without further protest, the Duros knelt down and took a small holoprojector out of his pocket, setting it down on the marble floor before activating it.

Anakin was barely able to bite back his cry of alarm. He could see why the clones had identified the dead woman as Obi-Wan – she _was_ Obi-Wan, right down to the mole on her forehead. Her hair was even parted the same way.

But it was the hair that gave it away. Obi-Wan had never cut her hair that short in all the years that Anakin had known her. Once he recognized that, it became easier to see the other physical differences. While Obi-Wan was all lean muscle, any excess body fat stripped away by her training, this woman tended to plumpness, her cheekbones not nearly so defined. The scar on Obi-Wan’s collarbone, caught unprepared by a vibroblade some years before Anakin had met her, was missing, as was the scar beneath her chin and the still-healing marks on her face left behind from shrapnel on Jabiim. Beneath her cloak, this woman was wearing civilian clothes – Chandrilan, Anakin thought, though he was hardly an expert on women’s clothing. There was no lightsaber on her belt – there was no place to _put_ a lightsaber, or even a blaster.

He felt his breath even out as he studied the woman. Despite the physical resemblance, this stranger wasn’t Obi-Wan. She just looked like her. A _lot_ like her.

“Can you explain this, General Kenobi?” asked the lieutenant, at the same time that Master K’Kruhk said, “A clone?”

“I’m afraid not, Master K’Kruhk,” Obi-Wan said, answering the second question first. Anakin felt her beats of hesitation stretch out in the Force, coupled with a discomfort so profound that it made his own skin itch.

He looked at her instead of the hologram, relieved to see her familiar features rather than those of the dead woman’s. Obi-Wan caught her lower lip briefly between her teeth before she spoke again, a millisecond of discomposure that was more upsetting than another kind of display would have been. “That woman isn’t a clone,” she said finally. “She’s my birth-sister.”


	2. Chapter 2

The rest of the galaxy might have been at war, but until now, Roah had remained untouched. Ina-Rati should have guessed that it wouldn’t last.

She supposed that it was unfair to blame the war, since as far as she knew, there wasn’t any fighting on Coruscant. It was unlikely that some Separatist battle droid had marched up to the Senate Building, shot its way into the Chandrilan offices, and murdered Shara-Von without laying so much as a metal-jointed finger on any other members of Senator Mothma’s staff. If one had, it would almost certainly have been made headlines on the HoloNet. Even here, on a backwater moon forgotten by most of the Core Worlds, they still got the HoloNet, intermittent though it could be due to the natural disruption caused by the swamps.

It was good enough today that the seldom-used holoprojector in the Greenstone Room was functioning with only a little static, Senator Mon Mothma’s voice coming through clearly and her image no more blurred than could be expected for a transmission over such distance. Standing beside the machine was the senatorial aide that had come to deliver the news in person. It wasn’t far from Coruscant to Chandrila, as such things went, but no one from the protectorate worlds would have been surprised if Mothma had sent the news of the death of the eldest daughter of the Red Woman of Roah by holomessage. That she had sent one of her aides, even if the woman had apparently already been in the system, earned the family’s grudging respect. She garnered a little more for appearing herself, even in a holoprojection.

From her seat at the side of the hall, first in the line of her female relatives that ran down the right wall of the Greenstone Room, Ina-Rati watched the two Chandrilan women – the holoprojection of the senator and the aide, a slim dark woman who had introduced herself as Ras Ulina. She turned the bones over in her fingers as she did so, although they sat silent against her skin, unable to offer any explanation of her sister’s death. Up above her, the fans rotated slowly, doing little to move the hot, damp air of the bayou through the room.

Ina-Rati could see that the Chandrilan woman was sweating in the heat, though she made no sign of her discomfort as she stood with her hands clasped behind her back, waiting for the Margravine’s response. Beside her, the figure of the Senator, dressed as she was for Coruscant, seemed almost comically unsuited for the Svea. Lucky for her that she wasn’t here.

Ina-Rati let her gaze flick casually to the chrono on her sister-in-law’s wrist, mentally calculating the time difference between Roah and Coruscant, and felt a little more grudging respect stir her blood. It was well past midnight in the city-sector where the Senate Building stood; surely Mon Mothma would normally have been asleep in her own bed by now, rather than giving a death-notice to a Margravine of one of her planet’s protectorate moons.

How strange it must have been, Ina-Rati thought, for Shara-Von to leave Roah, first for Chandrila, then for Coruscant. Both were peaceful worlds, in contrast to the vicious infighting that characterized Roah and the other Chandrilan protectorates. Even when the margravates weren’t fighting each other, they fought against the land and its other inhabitants; Chandrila might have been a soft, gentle planet characterized by warm seas and rolling plains, but Roah was a moon of contrasts, full of deserts and glaciers and jungles. Here in the Svea, close to the equator, the Svear fought battle after battle against the swamps, a war they had been fighting since Chandrila looked to the stars and realized that it had somewhere to send its undesirables. Even millennia on, Chandrila and its precious House still hesitated to acknowledge the protectorates as residents, though they were equally averse to the idea of letting them loose to forge their own way in the galaxy. That was why Shara-Von had left, after all. She would be – she would have been – Margravine after their mother. If she could convince Mon Mothma to accept her as a member of her staff, then she might have had a shot at convincing the Chandrilan House to take the protectorates seriously.

The Margravine had remained silent through both Ras Ulina’s spare account and Mon Mothma’s sympathies. As they finished, she sat still for a moment, a thin, wolf-faced woman in the Greenstone Chair, her red hair still bright despite her age, and then said, “You do not know who murdered my daughter?”

“No, Lady Svea,” said Mothma. “The Coruscant Security Force will investigate, but, if I may be honest with you –”

“You will be,” said the Margravine, as if it was a foregone conclusion that one of Chandrila’s leading daughters would tell the Red Woman of Roah anything but the truth.

Mon Mothma did not remark on the interruption. “I do not think that they will find the murderer. She was found in one of the lower levels of the city, in a district controlled by a crime syndicate called Crimson Arrow. It will be difficult for the police to accomplish anything.”

The Margravine did not ask what her daughter had been doing in such a place; Mothma did not remark on it. A Chandrilan, Ina-Rati thought uncharitably, no doubt assumed that one of the Rohane would have felt at home amongst the scum of Coruscant.

Ina-Rati turned the bones over between her fingers. They were old, but not so old as all that; half had been handed down from the Sveari _lamariex_ that had come before her, but the other half came from beasts that she had hunted and killed herself in the years since she had come to womanhood. Usually they spoke to her, but now they were quiet, useless dead things when they were most needed.

Mothma’s voice softened when the Margravine did not respond. She said, “I will have the body sent back to Roah when the police have finished.”

“My daughter Ina-Rati will go to Coruscant,” said the Margravine.

Ina-Rati raised her eyes from the bones. Ras Ulina turned to look at her, her expression challenging. Sweet Chandrilan child wondering if a second Rohane spearwoman would die in the big city, no doubt.

“Of course,” said Mon Mothma, her voice kind. “You’ll want family to bring her home.”

“I want a _lamarie_ to find her murderer,” said the Margravine, “and when he has been found, Ina-Rati will bring them both back to the Svea for Rohane justice.”

Senator Mothma might have been enlightened enough to accept a Rohane spearwoman as part of her retinue, but at the mention of Rohane justice even she blanched. Or Ina-Rati thought that she did; it was hard to tell from the hologram, especially as distorted as it was, but she was certain that she saw the other woman’s lips work for a moment.

Ras Ulina went slightly white around the eyes. “The Coruscant Security Force –”

“Will defer to the word of a senator,” said the Margravine. “Will they not?”

“I can make no promises, Lady Svea,” said Mothma. “But I will do what I can.”

The Margravine studied her in silence. The remainder of the Family sat equally still. They could have been graven images, Ina-Rati thought, except for the slight flutter of their breaths, her young nephew squirming slightly in his father’s lap. She told the bones over and over again, feeling their smoothness against her fingers, the slight roughness where runes had been cut into the larger ones, a sharp pin-prick as she touched the point of an eer tooth. Nothing, still.

“Very well,” said the Margravine at last. “I thank you for bringing us these words.”

“I liked Lady Shara-Von very much,” Mothma said after a moment. “I am sorry for your loss.”

The bones stirred.

Ina-Rati didn’t glance down at them, but she could feel the one called _rath_ , untruth, humming against the pad of her index finger. The others remained silent. She let her glance flicker towards her mother, saw the Margravine acknowledge that something had passed between them. Ras Ulina turned her head slightly, tracking the exchange. Sharp-sighted, for a Chandrilan.

“Save your sorrow, Senator,” said the Margravine. “Among the Svear, we hold our grief for an untimely death until the spirit of the killer has been sent to the depths. When justice has been done, then we will grieve. Perhaps you will join us.”

“I would like that,” Mothma said. The transmission buzzed and blurred on the last two syllables, rendering them nearly inaudible as the projection momentarily vanished, then reappeared. As it faded back in, Mothma was saying, “Is that on our end or theirs?” to someone Ina-Rati couldn’t see.

“Distortion from the swamps, Senator,” Ras Ulina said.

“Ah,” Mothma said. “Shara-Von told me about that. Lady Svea, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid that I need to cut this short; I have a committee meeting in the morning.”

The Margravine inclined her head. A moment later, the hologram winked out. Ras Ulina looked back at the Margravine.

“My starship is fueled and ready to depart, Lady Svea,” she said. “Lady Ina-Rati can be on Coruscant by morning if we leave in the next standard hour.”

Ina-Rati nodded in acknowledgment as her mother shot her a quick look. Accustomed as she was to being called out at a moment’s notice, she kept several go-bags and ready-kits packed. All she had to do was pick one.

The Margravine stood; the Family stood with her. “Return to your ship, Ras Ulina. My daughter will be with you shortly.”

The senatorial aide bowed at a precise angle and turned on her heel, her shoes clicking softly on the tiled floor. A fresh breath of hot, humid air flowed into the room as the doors opened silently in front of her, revealing a square of green bayou in the distance. After they had closed, as smoothly as they had opened, the Family began to disperse, murmuring to each other. Ina-Rati sank back into her seat, running the bones between her fingers.

With Mon Mothma and Ras Ulina gone, they were speaking to her again. _Rath_ leapt against her fingers, while _merith_ , kin, bit sharply into her palm and _tan-leth_ , stranger, burned against the curve of her smallest finger. Ina-Rati caught them in her hand and flung them out across the tiled floor.

The Margravine had been coming towards her, but she froze as the bones rattled across the tiles, waiting until they had all fallen before she set her foot down. Ina-Rati slid down off her chair and went to her hands and knees, bent down with her nose nearly to the floor as she peered at the bones.

“What do you see?” asked her mother.

_Rath_. “Someone is lying,” said Ina-Rati.

“Senator Mothma?”

“I don’t know. It isn’t clear.” _Merith_ and _tan-leth_ lay across each other – the large curved eer tooth, half the length of her hand, crossing the finger-bone of the talat she had killed on her eighteenth birthday. Ina-Rati tilted her head to one side, studying the familiar bones. She had never seen them together before; seeing them now surprised her. She knew every member of her immediate and extended family; most of them had been in this room a few minutes earlier. Every member except –

“The lost sister,” she murmured.

The Margravine stepped delicately through the fallen bones and crouched down beside her. “What did you say?”

Ina-Rati pointed out the crossed bones, and her mother sighed, touching her fingers to her eyelids in a gesture of resignation. “Ever Coruscant steals my children,” she said. “The Republic takes and takes and never gives back. What else?”

_Heth_ , danger, which could have meant anything, and _tir-narth_ , the drowned man.

“Vengeance,” said her mother when Ina-Rati indicated it. Her right hand clenched into a fist and she pounded it down on her knee. “We will have our justice.”

Ina-Rati wasn’t so certain. She had been reading the bones for almost twenty years now, since the Sveasene’s former _lamarie_ had put her own into Ina-Rati’s hand, and she knew now that while they always spoke truth, it was seldom the obvious answer.

She swept the bones back into the sarni-leather bag she always kept with her and rose, meaning to go and get her things. Her mother’s hand on her arm stopped her. “You’ve forgotten one,” she said, pointing.

Ina-Rati had to go back down on her knees to fetch out the shisheek claw from under a chair. She couldn’t imagine how it had gotten there; none of her other bones had gone so far. She scraped it carefully out, her forehead bumping against the seat of the chair as she leaned in, her fingertips just barely brushing the top of the claw until she could work it out without turning it over.

It was _hameth_ , truth, and it had fallen rune side up, which meant that it was also _jed-qarth_ , which was a bone that Ina-Rati had never thrown before. It meant _paladin_. She looked at it for a long moment before putting it back in the bag with all the others.

Her mother helped her up, letting her hands rest on Ina-Rati’s forearms as she said, “Bring your sister home. And bring me the being who murdered Shara-Von. You find out why your sister died, and then you bring me her murderer.”

Ina-Rati bowed her head. Her mother’s lips brushed over her brow and she shut her eyes, taking the charge. _Justicar_ was the word in Basic, or _revenger_ , but that was an oversimplification. The Rohane word was _jaedis_ , and what it literally meant was _one who pays for blood with blood_. It wasn’t quite the heaviest charge one Rohane could lay on another, but it was close.

“Yes, Mother,” Ina-Rati said. “I will.”

She didn’t need to add _or die trying_. Rohane didn’t think like that.

*

The Chandrilan starship was a FF-737 Peregrine, gracefully shaped and supposed to be fast considering its size. This one only had a crew of two, as well as Ras Ulina and a quartet of guards in the colors of Mon Mothma’s House, which turned out to be white and silver. _Boring_ , Ina-Rati thought as she approached, carrying her bags in one hand and her staff in the other.

“Why so many guards?” she asked after she had stowed her bags in the indicated cabin and emerged to find Ras Ulina standing on the ramp with the pilot, both of them contemplating the Sveasene.

“Pirates,” said the pilot. “With the war on, hyperspace and realspace routes aren’t secure anymore. Even senatorial ships are targets now.” He shook his head. “Organa of Alderaan was boarded last month, if you can believe that. His pilot told me that he was doing some of the shooting. Him, a senator!”

“What happened?”

“A Jedi starfighter patrol turned up and scared them off,” Ras Ulina said. “We shouldn’t have any trouble, though. This hyperspace lane goes straight to the Coruscant system; no stops like the Alderaan-Coruscant route.” She glanced at Ina-Rati, her eyes raking over the staff she still carried. “Was that all your luggage?”

“Yes. I don’t need much.”

Ras nodded as if unsurprised. “Then we ought to go. Captain?”

The pilot’s name turned out to be Teg Karass. His copilot was a square, smiling woman called Corrian Rilis with a Helane accent. The four guards didn’t introduce themselves, just nodded politely at her and settled themselves down in the ship’s small rec room over a dejarik board. Ina-Rati could have retreated back to her cabin to meditate, but instead she took one of the passenger seats in the Peregrine’s cockpit, just behind the pilot and co-pilot. Ras took the other seat, making a visible effort not to remark on her presence as the ship lifted off the Sveasene landing pad.

Through the viewport, Ina-Rati could see the sprawling white mass of the Sveasene spread out around them. Around it, along the curves of the river, rose the multi-colored rectangles that marked scatterblast houses of the city, tailing off into the brilliant green of the bayous that pressed in close around Sveasene. She watched until they rose up over the clouds, which only took a few minutes.

“Is this your first time offworld?” Ras asked.

Ina-Rati turned to look at her. “No,” she said. “I went to university on Alderaan.”

There was a moment of shocked silence in the cockpit, then Corrian laughed. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, Ras, you’ve got to stop thinking us Protectorate girls never get offworld. You _met_ Shara-Von, for stars’ burning!”

Ras’s skin was too dark to show a blush, but Ina-Rati could feel the embarrassment radiating off her in waves. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Ina-Rati toyed with the idea of drawing it out, but given that she was about to be stuck in a metal can with the woman for the next few hours and would probably have to work with her on Coruscant, that would probably be unwise. “It’s not the first time someone’s made that assumption,” she allowed. “Besides, who would have expected Alderaan instead of Chandrila or Coruscant?”

Corrian made a small, considering noise that was lost amidst the sound of the Peregrine clearing atmosphere. Teg said, “Buckle up and prepare to jump to hyperspace, people.”

Ina-Rati shut her eyes. She felt the moon tear away from her as they made the jump, the stars rushing close and far and expanding, the galaxy and the universe in their great spirals, and the ship as a relentless speck moving through that yawning nothing. When the initial shock of it had passed – nothing physical, just the way it ripped at her mind – she opened her eyes and stood up, leaning on her staff as she made her way to the door.

“I’ll be in my cabin,” she said when Ras looked up. The aide had taken out a datapad to read, but seemed surprised by Ina-Rati’s departure. “The reason I don’t go offworld very often,” she added, for the other woman’s benefit, “is because I’m not a huge fan of flying.”

“There’s some meds in the emergency kit, if you get hyperspace sickness,” Corrian offered, reaching for the square box under the console.

Ina-Rati shook her head, already a little queasy. “Thanks, but I’ve got my own way of dealing with it.”

Back in her cabin, she folded down the shelf-bed and sat on it, unlacing her soft-soled talat-skin boots and setting them aside. Onworld, she would have laid down on the floor, as close to the earth as she could get, but here in space it was all the same – and the hard chromium floor of the starship would have been no good for her back, anyway. From one of her bags, she found a small flask, which she had topped up the last time she had gone through her kit, and took a swig of the bitter green liquid within before replacing the flask.

She lay down on the shelf-bed. There wasn’t enough space for her to stretch her arms out over her head the way she would have liked, but Ina-Rati did her best anyway, feeling her back pop as she stretched. She settled her arms along her sides, palms flat on the bed, and shut her eyes. Inch by inch she catalogued her body, tightening and releasing each limb as she named it, so that by the time she reached the top of her head she had left her body behind, floating pleasantly in a space which to the eyes of her spirit looked like nothing so much than the great bayous that made up the Svea. Ina-Rati had seen the Svea from above before – from airships and starships, from the eyes of birds that she had cast her spirit into. Space wasn’t the Svea, but merely the way her mind resolved it so that she could understand what was beyond human comprehension.

There were tides in space, just as there were tides in the bayous. Ina-Rati opened herself up to them, let them become part of her. Here in hyperspace, she could feel the galaxy at war as she hadn’t on Roah or the last time she had flown, before the Clone Wars had begun. In the great bayou of space, each embattled planet burned like a single turi tree, its roots entangled in the waters and its boughs alight, trailing queensgrief moss that caught and spread the flame to another planet. But in the distance Ina-Rati sensed something else, like the hurricanes that ripped up the world around them, burst the levees on the rivers and sent water rushing through Sveasene and the outlying communities. The Svear knew how to ride out a hurricane, but they destroyed nevertheless. And you could always see them coming if you knew what to look for.

Where had the hurricane in space come from?

Ina-Rati considered this for a time, then let the question go. If there was a tide in space, then it existed as something far beyond Roah, and that was none of her concern. It was Chandrila’s and the Republic’s, the great people of the universe – far greater than her, who was merely a small _lamarie_ among the Svear, even a _lamarie_ who was the Red Woman’s last remaining daughter.

_Not the last._

_No,_ Ina-Rati told the bayou silently, _I am the last. The lost daughter may be our blood, but she is not Svear. That is more than blood._

The bayou did not answer. Ina-Rati released herself to the tides of space, felt them shift and flow around her, great and endless and clean. Time lost meaning. She drifted, letting the collection of atoms that comprised the truth of her spirit lose cohesion and expand beyond the confines of her skin. She wasn’t herself any longer, she was the universe, and the universe was boundless.

Eventually, she gathered herself back beneath her skin, opening her eyes to the plain metallic ceiling of the small cabin. As always, Ina-Rati felt a combination of yawning loss and sheer relief. She had looked upon the universe and found it fair – but she had also survived, returning whole and entire to her own body after casting her spirit loose to the cosmos. It was never a sure thing. Other _lamariex_ had died in trance – a slow death by thirst and starvation, but better than some. As far as Ina-Rati knew, they weren’t aware that they were dying. Their spirits had already left their bodies, after all.

She was lacing up her boots when the intercom crackled and Corrian’s Helane-accented voice said, _“Exiting hyperspace in five minutes. ETA on Coruscant is twenty minutes.”_

Ina-Rati nodded to herself, pulling the last knot tight and picking up her staff as she left the room behind, tapping it lightly on the floor as she made her way back to the front of the ship. When she entered the cabin, it was to find the space almost exactly as she had left it, save that Teg and Corrian seemed to be deeply involved in a game of sabacc and Ras was frowning at her datapad. She glanced up as Ina-Rati came in.

“Feel better?” she asked.

Ina-Rati studied her, trying to determine if she meant anything else besides the innocuous question itself, but it seemed as though Ras had simply decided that it was worth treating her as a person – as Chandrilan – rather than as an undesirable from one of the protectorate worlds. “Much,” she said at last, settling herself in her seat. She tucked her staff down behind her feet, where she could keep it from rolling around if need be.

She glanced up, saw the white lines of stars in hyperspace still stretching out before her, and glanced down again, already feeling queasy again.

“Ah, you kriffing bastard!” Corrian said, laughing as she slapped down her sabacc cards.

Teg gathered a pile of what appeared to be candy bars towards himself, grinning. “Told you I’d get you one of these days.”

She snorted, gathering up the discarded cards. “Eh, you got lucky. We’re coming out of hyperspace any minute; no time to beat your butt again.”

“Excuses, excuses,” Teg said lightly, hooking his comlink over his ear. “Prepare to enter realspace in 3 – 2 – 1 –”

Ina-Rati’s bones were tucked away in their pouch around her neck, but she felt them stir anyway, an agitated shiver that made her grab for them. “Wait!” she exclaimed, but it was too late; Teg had already pushed the lever that would jump them out of hyperspace.

The ship shuddered with the shock of the transition. Ina-Rati clamped a hand to her mouth, which had less to do with her outburst and more to do with her sudden urge to throw up. She looked up to see that Corrian and Ras had both turned to stare at her.

“Are you all right?” Ras asked.

The bones were fairly dancing in their pouch. Ina-Rati jerked it out from beneath her shirt, looking around for a suitable place to throw them.

“Oh, _kriff!_ ” Teg snarled, as the sensor array on the console appeared to go mad. “Multiple contacts on all headings –”

Red laserfire burned across the viewport in front of them, fired just over the Peregrine’s nose. Ina-Rati jumped at the sight, the pouch falling from her hand, bones spilling out across the cabin floor. She started to go after them, but Ras swung out a hand, forcing her back into the seat.

“We’re taking fire, everyone strap in,” Teg said shortly, his voice echoed over the intercom. “This could get messy – Corrian, contact Coruscant.”

Corrian hooked her own comlink over her ear. “Coruscant, this is Chandrilan diplomatic carrier _Serenity_ , ident number CHA-1834, we are taking fire, repeat, we are taking fire, location –” She broke off, swearing as Teg jinked the vessel hard sideways.

Ina-Rati yelped, clutching at the arms of her seat, and only once the ship had stabilized again did she start to fasten her safety straps. Her staff rolled away from beneath her feet, taking half her bones with it. The only ones that Ina-Rati could see were _heth_ and _jed-qarth_ , for the second time that day. Neither was helpful.

“What’s happen – oh, ancestors!” She shut her eyes as the ship rolled again, clapping both her hands to her mouth.

“Hang on,” Teg said tightly, his gaze fixed on the planet hanging before them, infinitely tiny in the vast mess of space. More laserfire burned across their viewport, moments before another starship dropped down in front of them, obscuring their view of the planet. It flashed its running lights at them.

“Coruscant, Coruscant, come in, this is diplomatic carrier _Serenity_ –” Corrian was still saying.

“Pirates this close to Coruscant?” Ras snarled. “They’ve got to be insane, Planetary Defense will blow them to shreds –”

Corrian looked up from the controls, not seeming to notice as Teg sent the Peregrine into what felt to Ina-Rati like a barely controlled dive. She saw the other starship roll to follow. “We’re still too far out,” she said. “Planetary Defense isn’t coming. We’re on our own.”

*

When the latest packet ship from the front landed at the starfighter staging area at the Jedi Temple, it disgorged Mace Windu, Kit Fisto and his Padawan, the Jedi Master known only as the Dark Woman, a handful of Knights returned for fresh orders, and several dozen wounded Jedi in various states of convalescence for the Temple Halls of Healing. More importantly as far as Anakin was considered, it was also carrying the modified starfighter that he had been forced to leave behind on Adi Gallia’s star destroyer several days ago when he and Obi-Wan had been ordered back to Coruscant. He greeted it with more enthusiasm than he had ever seen Obi-Wan greet any sentient being in the nearly twelve years they had known each other.

“A good Jedi doesn’t have possessions, my young Padawan,” she said, frowning at him. They had come down to meet Master Windu, who had surprised every Jedi present by briefly embracing Obi-Wan, apparently almost as surprised and relieved to see her alive as Anakin had been – though _he_ hadn’t hugged her. Not at first, anyway. He’d been too busy killing the bounty hunters that had cornered her and Alpha.

“It’s not a possession,” Anakin said virtuously, poking his head into the cockpit to make sure that all systems were in order. He hadn’t gotten his Temple-issue astromech back along with his fighter, but that was fine, that astromech had been a little too cautious for his tastes anyway. Maybe if he asked nicely, Padmé would lend him R2-D2 for the duration of the war. Artoo had been his first astromech; no droid since had ever quite matched up, though a few had come close. “I’ve just made a lot of modifications to her, you know. Wouldn’t want someone else handling her and getting confused.”

“Her,” Obi-Wan repeated, bemused. She overturned an empty bucket and sat on it, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin on her interlaced fingers.

“All starships are female,” Anakin said. “Old spacer custom.”

“I’m aware. I didn’t know that extended to starfighters as well.”

“Anything with wings and an engine.” He climbed out of the cockpit, dropping lightly down to the hanger floor, and put his back against the starfighter. “Doesn’t look like anyone messed with her.”

“I don’t see why they would,” Obi-Wan murmured. He saw her glance at the big chrono in the hanger, mouthing the numbers to herself.

“Is there somewhere we need to be, Master?”

“I’ve been summoned to a Council meeting as soon as Master Windu and Master Fisto get settled,” Obi-Wan said.

“Fresh orders?” Anakin asked. He wasn’t sure what he wanted the answer to be. On the one hand, he’d gotten out of the habit of sitting around on Coruscant with nothing but meditation and practice to occupy his time; on the other, he couldn’t say that he was particularly glad to be going back to a battlefield where he and Obi-Wan could be killed at any moment. _Maybe it’s not a deployment. Maybe it’s something else._ The normal course of Republic affairs that Jedi handled had mostly fallen to the wayside over the course of the war, but there were still situations that could only be adequately dealt with by a Jedi Knight.

“Probably more debriefings,” Obi-Wan said. She ran a hand through her hair, bound back from her face with a length of embroidered ribbon that she must have borrowed from Padmé. “I can’t get a sense of it, anyway.”

Anakin nodded. “We should go flying,” he said suddenly. “After you’re done. It’d be nice to do some flying without getting shot at.”

Obi-Wan’s eyebrows went up, but she smiled. “Well, I’ve been cleared to pilot again, anyway. The notion does have some appeal. Not that flying Asajj Ventress’s ship wasn’t its own kind of fun, but there were the bounty hunters to consider, of course.”

“And you keep claiming that you hate flying.”

“Flying with you is always an adventure,” Obi-Wan said diplomatically. “But in Coruscant space we ought to be safe enough –”

The words were barely out of her mouth before the all-call alarm in the hanger began to sound.

Obi-Wan and Anakin didn’t even look at each other, just flung themselves at the line of standby starfighters on the opposite end of the hanger. Techs and maintenance came boiling out of the ready-room. Elsewhere in the Temple, onworld Knights and any Padawans rated for deep-space combat would have halted whatever they were doing and dashed for the starfighter bays, but Obi-Wan and Anakin were the only Jedi here now. Anakin spared a moment of relief that Jedi almost never wore flightsuits as he vaulted into the cockpit of the nearest starfighter, pulling the comlink band on the dash down over his head. In the next starfighter over, Obi-Wan was doing the same.

“Fueled and loaded for krayt, Master Kenobi, Master Skywalker,” said the head tech, slapping Obi-Wan’s starfighter on the side. “Good hunting.”

“Thank you,” Obi-Wan said, sounding distracted.

Anakin strapped himself into the seat, listening to the R3 unit in the starfighter’s wing chirp as it introduced itself to him. He and Obi-Wan were already rolling to the launch bay as the canopy slid shut.

He keyed on his comlink, which was set to the band normally used by Jedi. “What are we dealing with, Master?”

Obi-Wan answered him in clipped tones that suggested that she was listening to two com bands at once. _“A Chandrilan diplomatic cruiser dropped out of hyperspace at the far edge of the system and was immediately set on by what their copilot identifies as pirates. Coruscant Planetary Defense refuses to respond due to their location, claiming that it’s too far out. Double on the Z-band.”_

“What?” Anakin said, flicking the comlink over. “That doesn’t make any sense. Planetary Defense is supposed to cover the entire system.”

_“Indeed,”_ Obi-Wan agreed, her voice flat.

The two starfighters launched into the open air. Their path took them away from the layers of traffic passing ceaselessly through the Coruscant sky lanes and they arched up, wing to wing, in complete unison, breaking atmosphere seconds later. At this distance Anakin couldn’t make out the ships in question, but the coordinates came across his viewscreen a moment later, the R3 unit chirping as it transmitted them.

His earpiece crackled as the distress call came in. _“ – Coruscant, this is an unarmed diplomatic vessel carrying sensitive diplomatic information and personnel, request immediate assistance –”_

_“Negative, CHA-1834, you are out of the planetary response zone –”_

_“This is General Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Jedi Order,”_ Obi-Wan said crisply. _“Chandrilan vessel, there are two Jedi starfighters inbound to you. At your current location and our maximum speed, we’ll arrive in six minutes. Can you hold out that long?”_

There was a moment’s pause. _“Not sure, General,”_ said the Chandrilan speaker, a woman whose voice Anakin didn’t recognize. _“We’re trying to make a break for the planet, but we’re pretty heavily outnumbered. They’re firing to disable, not to destroy, though. If they board, we’ve got four guards onboard, along with two civilians who are part of Senator Mothma’s personal staff.”_

_“Acknowledged. Soft contact in five minutes.”_ She didn’t bother to explain the military term, which was clone talk for a visual encounter with an enemy. A year and a half ago it probably would have seemed funny to hear a Jedi speaking so casually, but this far into the war it was second nature to them. Switching to the J-band, the Jedi frequency, she added, _“Anakin, are your scanners picking them up yet?”_

“Not – ah, got them!” Anakin said, the R3 unit chirping as it interpreted them for him. “Six vessels, one Corellian gunship, three Trill-9 Firesprites, and a pair of modified SR-87s, unless they’re masking their signals. Still no visual confirmation.”

_“I was almost starting to worry that we might be outnumbered,”_ Obi-Wan said lightly.

_“Windu here,”_ the comlink said. _“Seven Jedi starfighters in the air, Obi-Wan. We’re about three minutes behind you.”_

“Any luck in getting Planetary Defense to send out a squad?” Anakin asked. “Mothma’s going to lose it if she finds out they refused to send support to one of her ships.”

_“Half the Senate will,”_ said Kit Fisto. _“Not to mention every merchant freighter in the galaxy.”_

_“I’ll take that as a no,”_ Obi-Wan said. She switched back to the Z-band. _“Coruscant, General Kenobi here. Requesting fighter support from the Home Fleet.”_

_“Negative, General Kenobi. That vessel is out of planetary response range.”_

“New contact,” Anakin said, glancing at his viewscreen. “Heading – never mind, looks like a merchant freighter that jumped in, saw the fight, and jumped back out.”

_“And there goes the Coruscant stock market,”_ one of the other Jedi remarked. _“It’s going to be all across the HoloNet in the next hour.”_

_“Coruscant, get me the OOD of the Home Fleet flagship,”_ Obi-Wan said, cool as a coura-fruit.

_“Er –”_

_“Do I mumble?”_

“Soft contact in three minutes,” Anakin said. “Going weapons hot.”

_“Weapons hot,”_ Obi-Wan returned.

_“This is Captain Prohaska. What in blazes –”_

_“This is General Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Jedi. You are requested to send fighter support to heading K38-L92 to assist in defense of senatorial diplomatic cruiser CHA-1834.”_

_“Negative, General Kenobi. That heading is out of –”_

“Two minutes,” Anakin said. He could just see flashes of laserfire in the distance, and steadier lights that were probably the running lights of the six starships. The ships themselves were indistinguishable. He glanced down at the viewscreen, where the Chandrilan cruiser was still managing to avoid capture but was rapidly being boxed in, and put on an extra burst of speed, wishing that he was in his usual starfighter.

“Chandrilan vessel, Commander Skywalker of the Jedi here,” he said. “You holding on all right?”

_“We’ve had better days,”_ said the Chandrilan speaker; Anakin assumed she was the copilot, since the pilot was undoubtedly occupied at the moment.

“Are you unarmed?” He asked the question _pro forma_ , since if they were tooled up, they would undoubtedly have been shooting back.

Obi-Wan’s voice broke into the conversation. _“Captain Prohaska,”_ she said, _“a senatorial vessel is under attack in Coruscant space. Planetary defense includes not just the immediate area of the planet, but the entire star system. If you continue to refuse, I will not only make sure that you face court-martial in front of the entire Republic Senate, a government made up of individuals whose ships are identical to the one that you are refusing to defend, but I will make sure that your name is personally dragged through the mud on every HoloNews broadcast from now until the end of the war.”_

“One minute to soft contact,” Anakin said into the silence that followed this pronouncement. 

_“Furthermore, I assume that Galaxy 9 News has continued to monitor this frequency in my absence. Are you there, Taris-Keir-Peli?”_

A voice that Anakin heard every time he turned on the HoloNews came over the comlink, to a shot of astonishment that reverberated through the listening Jedi. _“Glad to see that rumors of your death were exaggerated, Master Kenobi.”_

_“Indeed. I assume that you’ve been recording this exchange.”_

_“Of course. My assistant is on the comm to Senator Mothma’s office as we speak to get a reaction to this. I’d love to get a word from you and your apprentice as soon as you return.”_

“Master –” Anakin warned, feeling his hands flex on the controls of the starfighter. The starships were clearly visible now: the Chandrilan FF-737 Peregrine ducking and weaving through the net created by the pirate vessels, the three crescent Trill-9 Firesprite starfighters boxing it off every time it came close to escaping.

_“Weapons free,”_ Obi-Wan said to him on the J-band. _“Fire a warning shot over the gunship’s bow.”_ Back to the Z-band: _“Forget the Senate, Captain Prohaska, although I’m sure that it’s difficult for you since despite Separatist attempts to the contrary, they remain this republic’s governing body. If you do have a problem with that, Count Dooku is always taking volunteers. If word gets out to the general population of the Galactic Republic that pirates are active in Coruscant space, operating freely without the interference of the Republic Navy and with the temerity to attack a senatorial vessel, then it will cripple the economy of half the Republic, including Coruscant itself. Do you understand me?”_

There was a long moment of silence, into which Anakin fired a pair of laser blasts that shot over the nose of the Corellian gunship and immediately got the attention of the six pirate vessels. “Hard contact,” he said, for the benefit of the audience.

_“Three minutes out,”_ Windu said. _“Be aware that a news cruiser has left the planet in pursuit. We’ll discuss this later, Obi-Wan.”_

Her voice still calm, Obi-Wan switched to an open band and said, _“Pirate vessels, this is General Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Jedi Order. You are ordered to stand down and surrender or be destroyed.”_

_“Only two fighters, Jedi?”_

“We only need two fighters for a load of _skocha kung_ ,” Anakin snapped.

Sulkily, over the Z-band, came the voice of the Home Fleet captain, _“Clone fighter squad away. Contact in ten minutes.”_

_“Acknowledged,”_ Obi-Wan said.

_“Kark on you, Jedi!”_ That was the pirates – Anakin assumed that it was the gunship, which seemed the most likely candidate for flagship. Two of the Firesprites were already coming around to face the Jedi starfighters.

Obi-Wan didn’t give him a second warning. Anakin only had a moment’s premonition in the Force, then a blast from her cannons obliterated one of the Firesprites. The second responded with a barrage of laserfire that Obi-Wan dodged, her fighter flipping through the air as she made a run past it towards the Peregrine.

“Fierfek,” Anakin hissed, diving after her; the Force hadn’t told him that she was going to do that. Laserfire scored across the Firesprite as he fired; he saw the human pilot’s surprised face in the microseconds before the starfighter exploded. Anakin wheeled aside, providing covering fire for Obi-Wan as she strafed the gunship.

Automatically, he reached out for the bond between him, expecting to fall into the now-familiar shared battle mind that he had become accustomed to in their many campaigns since Geonosis. Instead his mind slid away into empty space, as though Obi-Wan wasn’t there at all, startling him so badly that his hands twisted on the steering yoke of the starfighter, sending him into an uncontrolled spin towards the nose of the Chandrilan ship. His astromech warbled in panic.

_“Anakin!”_

Obi-Wan’s panicked cry startled him back to himself. He grabbed at the yoke, straightening the fighter out, and even managed a little wave as he zipped past the viewport of the Chandrilan Peregrine, close enough that he could see the astonished faces of the pilot, copilot, and the two passengers seated behind them. His hands weren’t shaking – he had been trained too well for that – but he could feel his horror shuddering through him, counterpoint to the anguish in Obi-Wan’s voice over the comlink. He was the best pilot in the Jedi Order – probably one of the best pilots, combat or civilian, in the entire galaxy. He’d never lost control like that before, not even when he was a kid. He could have been killed. He could have killed someone else.

He could have killed Obi-Wan.

_“Anakin, are you all right?”_ He could hear the worry in her voice, but he couldn’t feel her in the Force. It wasn’t the way it had been with A’Sharad Hett and Ki-Adi-Mundi, where he had always been aware of other Jedi, even without the Master-Padawan bond. It wasn’t even the way it was flying with Forceblind pilots, like clones, who had null or minimal midichlorian counts, where Anakin was always aware of them, even if they couldn’t return the favor. It was as though she had simply dropped out of the Force entirely.

He managed an affirmative, slipping through space to head off one of the SR-87s as it tried to line the Peregrine up against the gunship, where they would have been able to force a boarding airlock to airlock or with a pressure tunnel. His laserfire bounced harmlessly off the starship’s shields, but it forced the boxy pirate ship to jink aside, buying the Peregrine a few more seconds.

“Chandrilan vessel, if you see a path to open space, take it,” he ordered, glad to hear the steadiness in his own voice.

_“Trust me, Commander, we’re way ahead of you there.”_

_“Two minutes to soft contact,”_ Windu said; Anakin glanced at his viewscreen and saw the markers of the incoming Jedi starfighters and one Galaxy 9 news cruiser on their way in. The clone squadron wasn’t close enough to show up yet, since the Home Fleet was currently patrolling on the other side of the system.

_Force save me, I could shoot Obi-Wan,_ he thought distractedly, leveling a barrage of laserfire at the Corellian gunship as it made to slide in on the Peregrine’s port side. It banked hard, a few of the blasts bouncing off the shields and the others flowing harmlessly past. Obi-Wan feinted right and dove left, almost wingtip to wingtip with the remaining Trill-9 before she banked hard, dropped, and blew it to infinity with her belly-guns. There was a whoop over the comlink from the Peregrine, but Anakin set his teeth in his lower lip, distracted even as he headed off one of the SR-87s again. Obi-Wan was a good combat pilot, almost as good as he was, but she wasn’t usually so aggressive in the air.

He dropped like a stone as the gunship fired at him, his R3 unit beeping urgently at him as the laser blasts shot over his head, close enough that Anakin could see them through the canopy. He flipped over and returned fire, vaguely aware of Obi-Wan making a series of short runs at the two SR-87s, trying to keep them away from the Peregrine. He couldn’t feel her in the Force, but he could feel her starfighter, the familiar mental spikiness of electronics that was the same in both podraces and aerial dogfights.

_“Stop fooling around and come help me!”_ Obi-Wan’s voice was sharp. _“That gunship’s just a distraction, come – oh, Sithspit!”_

Anakin jerked around, swore as a laser blast came close enough to score the paint from one of his left wing, and swung himself into a barrel roll to dodge the barrage of shots that followed.

_“We’re being boarded,”_ said the Chandrilan cruiser, her voice grim.

“Oh, fierfek!” Anakin swore, pulling out of the barrel roll. He got a quick look out his canopy at the Peregrine and one of the SR-87s, which had connected with a pressure tunnel. The remaining SR-87 was concentrating fire on Obi-Wan, who was dodging in and out of laserfire.

“These guys are too good for pirates,” he snarled, glancing at his viewscreen; the other Jedi were still almost a hundred kilometers out.

_“Agreed,”_ Obi-Wan said. _“Anakin, cover me, I’m going to make a hard landing and help them out. Whoever they are, they can’t be allowed to reach the cockpit and jump to hyperspace.”_

“You’re going to – oh, kriff, Master, have you –” He screamed frustration at the gunship as he dodged laserfire, hearing Obi-Wan calmly giving orders to the Peregrine over the comlink. “Blast it, we’re supposed to be better than this!”

_“Anakin, now!”_

He dropped and flipped around, covering for Obi-Wan as the ramp for the Peregrine’s loading bay came down, the magnetic shield that kept the atmosphere in place shimmering blue. “Master, don’t you dare go in there!” he yelled. “That’s how –”

_That’s how you died on Jabiim._

His hands stilled on the controls, the memory rippling through him. When their one good AT-AT had gone down, Obi-Wan had rushed in to evacuate it before it exploded. She hadn’t succeeded.

The R3 unit’s frantic cheeping got his attention, and Anakin yanked hard on the yoke, barely dodging out of the way as the remaining SR-87, the one which wasn’t connected to the Peregrine, fired at him. He glanced sideways at the Peregrine, rapidly calculating how large the loading bay was; Obi-Wan had already cleared the doors easily and vanished inside.

He glanced at his viewscreen, letting the Force guide him as he dodged and returned laserfire. Windu and the others would be arriving right about –

_“Hard contact,”_ said Kit Fisto, and a pair of proton torpedoes flashed past Anakin and detonated against the gunship’s shields.

– now.

He glanced over his shoulder for visual confirmation that the other Jedi had arrived, though he could see it well enough on his viewscreen, and said, “Obi-Wan’s boarded the Chandrilan ship. I’m going after her.”

*

The sound of an explosion reverberated through the Peregrine as Corrian reached beneath console and pulled out a black plastoid case. She opened it and passed blasters to Teg and Ras, hesitating before holding one out to Ina-Rati. “Do you know how to shoot?”

Ina-Rati did – you didn’t live long in the Svea without knowing how to protect yourself from the bayou’s many dangers – so she took the blaster and the spare power packs, tucking the ammunition into a pocket of her tunic and the blaster into her belt. Her bones were still scattered across the floor of the cockpit, but she retrieved her staff, setting her hands into the familiar grips but not yet activating it.

Blasterfire continued in the back of the Peregrine, along with several more explosions. Corrian still had her comlink hooked over her ear, listening with her head cocked to one side. After a moment, her hands moved over the console. “Loading bay is open, General. Come on in.”

Ras was standing near the door with her blaster held in both hands, but she turned at this and blinked at Corrian. “What?”

“We’ve got a Jedi guest,” Corrian said. She blinked and put her hand to her ear, cupping the comlink. “We’ve got two, actually.”

“And backup,” Teg added, gesturing out the viewport; Ina-Rati saw half a dozen starfighters streak by. “That will show the bastards –”

“If they don’t get in here first,” Corrian snapped. She took her hand off the comlink, picking up the blaster she’d laid down in her lap. “If we get out of this, I’m having blast doors installed on this kriffing ship, I swear to the ancestors.”

They fell silent, listening to the sound of blasterfire. It was getting closer, which didn’t bode well. Ina-Rati planted her feet more firmly on the durasteel floor of the cockpit and gripped her staff, wishing that she was back on Roah, where she would have been able to draw strength from the land.

There was a burst of blasterfire, very close to the door, and Ina-Rati flinched. A moment later a light over the door began to blink red.

“They’re slicing in,” Teg said, glancing at the console. He and Corrian both stood, blasters pointed at the door.

Ina-Rati depressed the controls on her staff. The ends of it crackled, glowing faintly blue as the casing slid away. Ras gave her a startled look. “What is _that_?”

“Shockstaff,” Ina-Rati said. “Phrikite alloy, neural stingers on the ends that will knock out a human or near-human for about an hour. My sister had one too.”

Shara-Von wouldn’t have carried it on Coruscant, though. A staff would have been too noticeable amongst Senator Mothma’s retinue. Had she even been able to get a blow in before she died?

Ina-Rati bit her lip and turned back to the door, where the red light was blinking more and more rapidly. She couldn’t afford to think of Shara-Von, not now. If she survived this, she would have time enough for her sister later.

Reaching inside of herself, Ina-Rati found the core of her spirit and stretched it out, watching with her second sight as the solid metal of the door turned translucent, revealing the shadows of the pirates and their astromech droid beyond. Somewhere in the distance two blue lights flashed, almost overshadowed by the supernova-bright spirits wielding them. Ina-Rati blinked, letting the second sight slide aside, and readied herself as the door began to creak open, protesting the entire time.

Ras fired as soon as she had the shot. There was a muffled cry from beyond and she fired again, her face fixed in a rictus of concentration. The door creaked open a little further and amidst the shouting, Ina-Rati heard someone yell, “Just give it up, Channy! There’s nowhere else to run!”

In answer, Ras fired again; there was a scream of pain behind the still mostly closed door.

Ina-Rati thought of her bones, but of course they were scattered across the floor of the cockpit and wouldn’t have done her any good now anyway.

With a great rush, the door slid the rest of the way open, groaning in protest as it did, and Ina-Rati walloped her staff into the head of the first man through the door, a near-human with pale green skin. The neural stinger knocked him out cold, sending him sprawling down, and a blaster shot from behind her took down the second. Ina-Rati struck again and again, blasterfire deafening her, until the sweat was pouring down her face and she thought that she was seeing things – blue light hissing and humming as it cut down the remaining pirates.

She raised her staff for one last blow as a shadowed figure stepped towards her, the buzzing from the neural stingers nearly deafening her. Sweat was pouring into her eyes; it felt like high summer in the bayou, when it was so hot that steam rose from the swamps and the humidity thick enough to cut with a spoon. Ina-Rati looked with her second sight instead, expecting clarity but rearing back in surprise at the too-bright spirit of the woman. It was like looking into a sun.

She struck out blindly. A gleaming blue blade blocked the blow, the lightsaber sizzling and sparking as it met the phrikite alloy of the shockstaff. A moment later she was shoved backwards as though by an invisible hand, the sheer power of it dazzling her second sight. Corrian caught her as she stumbled back, the neural stingers on her shockstaff disengaging as Ina-Rati released it.

The lightsaber deactivated. In the artificial lights of the cockpit, Ina-Rati looked up to see a small woman clad in Jedi robes with her red hair caught in a ribbon. She stared down at Ina-Rati, holding her lightsaber hilt in one hand. For a moment Ina-Rati couldn’t see her face, too dazed by the brightness of the other woman’s spirit.

She blinked her second sight away, meaning to apologize. Behind the woman, she could see another Jedi, a young man with a Padawan braid and a still-lit lightsaber; his spirit was as bright as hers, so that the two of them together had blinded her for a crucial instant.

The words froze on her tongue as Ina-Rati saw the woman’s face. “Shara-Von?” she gasped instead.

When the Jedi woman spoke, it was Shara-Von’s voice, but with a posh Coruscanti accent that Shara-Von would have laughed herself sick over. “Wrong twin, I’m afraid,” she said gently, “I’m Obi-Wan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made a crack elsewhere about how I should include a link to Obi-Wan's hairstyle in each chapter, then I actually started keeping track for continuity and descriptive purposes, so here we go: [Obi-Wan](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304051542129/) and [Ina-Rati](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304051554743/) (not described).
> 
> Ina-Rati's shockstaff is based on Jarael's from _Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic_.


	3. Chapter 3

_“Sithspit, what a mess,”_ Mace Windu said, his voice a little tinny over the comlink. He sounded tired and a little annoyed, neither of which boded well; Anakin didn’t know enough about current deployments to guess where he had been before transferring to the packet ship that had landed on Coruscant not even an hour ago.

In perfect unison, Anakin and Obi-Wan turned to look out the Peregrine’s viewport, where the Galaxy 9 News cruiser had been joined by two more cruisers of rival networks. The recently arrived clone squadron had formed a perimeter around the Peregrine and the seven Jedi starfighters, as though expecting the pirates – or whoever they had been – to return at any moment. The gunship and the free SR-87 had jumped to hyperspace soon after Obi-Wan and Anakin had boarded the Peregrine; the second SR-87 had released the pressure tunnel and jumped soon afterwards, though Anakin couldn’t imagine that they had much of a crew left, considering how many men he and Obi-Wan had cut down in the Peregrine’s halls.

“I’m sorry, Master Windu,” Obi-Wan said, sounding as contrite as a Padawan. It made Anakin wince to hear it, not liking that tone in her voice. “I invited it when I initiated contact with Taris-Keir-Peli. I lost my temper.”

Anakin bit his lip, not quite ready to contradict his Master but not really willing to let the statement stand, either. He’d seen Obi-Wan lose her temper before, usually at him. She didn’t go quiet and dangerous, the way she had at the Home Fleet captain; she didn’t threaten, she just did. Obi-Wan only threatened when she knew exactly what she was doing.

They were still Forceblind to each other, but Obi-Wan turned and frowned at him anyway, even though Anakin hadn’t actually said anything yet. Anakin made a face in response; he knew better than to contradict her in front of the second in command of the entire Jedi Order. Well, most of the time, anyway.

_“Not your fault, Obi-Wan. Galaxy 9 and the others were listening anyway. I can’t say that I’m unhappy with the idea of Planetary Defense getting a public review of their policies. The Council will back you on this one; we’ll deal with the Admiralty fallout. This policy is a threat to public safety.”_

Obi-Wan nodded, seemed to remember that Windu couldn’t see her, and said, “I’m glad to hear it, Master Windu.”

“What about the ship, Master?” Anakin asked. “We can’t sit out here forever – the press is probably already spinning stories as it is.”

There was a moment of silence, in which Anakin had the brief impression in the Force of a hasty, muffled conversation just out of his earshot. He and Obi-Wan leaned on the console and waited, watching the starships hanging in empty space outside the viewport.

_“Go ahead and return to Coruscant,”_ Windu said at last. _“Return to your starfighters and fly as escort to the Galactic City Spaceport – Navy and a clone squad will meet you there and take charge of the prisoners, while Senator Mothma handles the rest of it. It’s her ship, after all. Like I said, we’ll handle the Admiralty fallout. Lucky for us you two are already public figures, so the press knows where to start; we don’t have to push them.”_

“Lucky,” Anakin groused, ignoring the sharp look Obi-Wan shot him. “Not to name names, Master Windu, but one of us has been reported dead for the past month. Isn’t a miraculous resurrection going to raise eyebrows?”

_“We’re counting on it. Between this attack and Obi-Wan’s return to the living, the press ought to conveniently forget that someone might be murdering Jedi on Coruscant.”_

Into the silence that followed this pronouncement, Anakin said with forced lightness, “Wow, this just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?”

“That’s one way to put it,” Obi-Wan said.

_“One more thing, Obi-Wan –”_ Windu paused. Anakin took the hint and left the cockpit, raking his hands through his too-long hair, flicking his padawan braid out of the way

They had carried the wounded, both the two surviving Chandrilan guards and the surviving pirates, into several of the Peregrine’s empty cabins. Anakin ignored the bloodstains on the durasteel floor of the corridor as he made his way there, reaching out with the Force until he found the red-haired woman from the cockpit kneeling over one of the injured guards, a medkit at her side. Anakin crouched down beside her.

“Do you need any help?”

She tilted her head to one side and looked up at him, her expression considering. There was something familiar about the profile of her face, though Anakin couldn’t put his finger on it. “Are Jedi healers too?”

“Some of us. I’ve had some training, but I’m no good except as a field medic. I can slap a bacta patch on with the best of them, though.”

She shook her head. “That’s not necessary, but thanks for the offer, Master Jedi. I’ve gotten them stabilized,” she said. “Blaster burns and blunt force trauma, mostly; everyone else is dead.” She gave the lightsaber hanging on his belt a significant look. “No stun setting on that, I guess.”

“Jedi don’t draw our lightsabers unless we’re prepared to take a life,” Anakin said.

She eyed him thoughtfully. “Well,” she said, “that’s a nice philosophy.”

She looked like she was about to say something else, but then the man she was treating groaned, starting to stir from unconsciousness. Anakin reached down and pressed two fingers to his forehead, saying, “Sleep,” and letting the Force slide through the words. The wounded man’s eyes fluttered shut, his breathing evening out. 

“Thank you,” the woman said, taking a bacta patch out of her medkit, and added grudgingly, “I’m not very good at that sort of thing.” She stripped it out of the package and pressed it to the blaster burn on the man’s shoulder, letting it adhere to the skin.

Anakin rested his arms on his knees, his hands dangling. “So you’re a doctor? You seem to have everything here under control.”

She shook her head, wiping her hands clean on the knees of her close-fitting trousers. “Not a doctor. I’m a _lamarie_ , so I have training as a healer, though. I’m the best that some of the Svear in the bayous get.”

“I didn’t know Chandrila had bayous.”

She stiffened. “I’m not from Chandrila. I’m from Roah”

Anakin mouthed apology. “That’s one of the protectorate moons, isn’t it? Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed.”

He sensed the release of some of her tension in the Force. “Not a lot of people outside the system know about the protectorate worlds,” she said, giving him a crooked half-smile. “Chandrila’s dirty little secret.”

“Well, I’m a Jedi,” Anakin said. “We’re not most people. Dirty little secrets are our specialty.” He put his head to the side. “Wait, that didn’t sound right.”

She grinned. “I’m sure.” She started to pack her medkit back up. “I assume that there will be medical attention waiting when we arrive planetside?”

Anakin nodded. “Medical attention and a Republic Navy security team to take the pirates who survived into custody.” None of them were in the same cabin as the guards; they had been treated and locked into one of the Peregrine’s other cabins instead.

She nodded, apparently satisfied by this. “Good. What will happen to them then?”

“Prison.” He paused and reconsidered, remembering the reading that Ki-Adi-Mundi had given him after he’d been reassigned as the Cerean Master’s Padawan. “Probably execution. The new Senate act, the Enhanced Security and Enforcement Act, has pretty strict penalties for piracy in Republic space during wartime. It’s classed as an act of warfare against the Republic, even if the pirates aren’t acting on anyone else’s agenda. They don’t get trials anymore.”

The Rohane woman considered this. “Good,” she said again. “I’m surprised. I didn’t think the Republic was so efficient.”

“Efficient isn’t exactly how I would put it.”

Anakin glanced up at Obi-Wan’s voice, wincing internally when he realized that he hadn’t felt her approach in the Force. He straightened up, shaking his cloak loose so that it fell in straight folds to his feet. “What did Master Windu say?”

Obi-Wan shot him a warning look, her gaze fixed on the Rohane woman – actually, Anakin realized, glancing between them, not on the woman herself, but on a point just over her head, as if Obi-Wan was unwilling to look at her directly. There was something strange in the Force. Anakin couldn’t sense anything from Obi-Wan, still – there was a dead spot where she ought to have been, and if Anakin hadn’t been standing in the same room as his Master, looking at her, he didn’t know if he would have been able to bear it for more than a few minutes. As it was, he found himself stepping towards her, until he was close enough to touch. He didn’t remember moving.

The Rohane woman had tracked the movement with her eyes. She stood up, slinging her medkit over her shoulder, and said, “You don’t think capital punishment for a crime like piracy is efficient, Master Jedi? They’re guilty, after all. A trial is a waste of time and money.”

“Execution without trial is a corruption of power,” Obi-Wan said. “The knowledge that they’ll most likely be put to death out of hand makes it even less likely that pirates like this will surrender – not to mention that it doesn’t account for the circumstances that might lead individuals to fall to piracy as an option, of which this war has created many.”

“Spoken like a Coruscanti,” said the Rohane woman.

“Spoken like a Jedi.” There was a sharp bite to the words, but Obi-Wan dropped her gaze almost immediately rather than meet the other woman’s eyes. She added more gently, “I am what my life has made me, my lady.”

“So am I, Master Jedi.”

Obi-Wan didn’t answer, just turned on her heel and strode back out into the corridor. Anakin followed her, throwing an apologetic glance over his shoulder at the Rohane woman. She was standing still in the center of the room, holding her medkit in one hand. The too-bright artificial lighting of the room washed out the color from her hair, illuminating the fine bones of her face. There was something disconcertingly familiar about her, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it could be.

He bit his lip, wondering if it was worth trying to unpack the strangeness of the exchange, and finally defaulted to asking again, “So what _did_ Master Windu say?”

Obi-Wan checked her forward momentum for an instant, then resumed her steady march towards the loading bay. “He gave me some advance notice of what was supposed to be covered at the Council meeting later today. It may have to be delayed while today’s events are investigated.”

“And that news was?” Anakin pushed. He knew he was prying, but he was sure that Obi-Wan was used to it after twelve years of partnership. He might keep secrets from Obi-Wan, but there weren’t a lot of things that she wouldn’t tell him if he asked. She had made a point of honesty in the first few months that they had been Master and Padawan, when they had both been feeling their way into their strange new relationship.

Obi-Wan raised a hand to her hair, seemed to remember that she would dislodge the ribbon binding it in place if she ran her hand through it, and pushed a few loose strands back behind her ear instead. Slowly, she said, “The High Council is making me a Master.”

Anakin stopped dead in the middle of the corridor. “But that’s fantastic!”

Obi-Wan had taken a few more steps forward before noticing that he had halted. She turned around, both hands raising to her hair again, a familiar nervous gesture that made Anakin’s palms itch sympathetically. “It’s a great honor,” she said, her voice smoothing out into the pattern familiar to Anakin from dozens of HoloNews interviews. “Most Masters don’t achieve that rank until they’ve trained their first Padawans – or at least they didn’t before the war. Now –”

“Don’t even say it, Master,” Anakin snapped. “Aren’t you pleased? You deserve it.” A thought struck him. “Am I –”

She shook her head, on more familiar ground now. “The Council hasn’t decided that you’re ready to stand your Trials yet, my young Padawan.” She gave him a ghost of a smile. “Which makes you still my young Padawan.”

“Better yours than Master Ki’s,” Anakin said. If the Council had been planning to knight him, they would have done so after Jabiim and Aargonar, when he was Masterless. Disobeying Ki-Adi-Mundi and going after Obi-Wan the way that he had done had probably sealed his fate as a Padawan for the next decade or so. It was worth it, though.

Obi-Wan glanced down, but her smile this time was genuine. “Thank you, Anakin,” she said. Nothing else, just that, and Anakin fell in love all over again.

For once, he was relieved that they were Forceblind to each other for however long it lasted. Obi-Wan might be a model Jedi Knight without any secrets to keep, but Anakin wasn’t. If Obi-Wan knew, then she would never look at him the same way again. He was certain that she wouldn’t turn him in to the High Council for breaking his vows, but her knowing would change everything, and Anakin didn’t want anything to change.

Dry-mouthed, he said, “I’m serious. Congratulations. You’re better than any of the Masters – any of the other Masters, I mean. Especially those sticks in the mud on the High Council.”

Obi-Wan ducked her head. “Well,” she said, “about that. There’s an empty spot on the Council because of Master Billaba’s…incapacitation. They’ve offered it to me.”

Anakin couldn’t help it. He stepped forward and hugged Obi-Wan, wrapping his arms around so tightly that it had to hurt. She was still for a moment, then she returned the embrace. To his surprise, she didn’t push him away immediately or try to squirm free, just shut her eyes and leaned against him.

“You know I haven’t said yes yet,” she said eventually.

“But you’re going to,” Anakin said. “You’ve wanted it as long as I’ve known you.”

“Qui-Gon turned down an appointment to the High Council.” She untangled herself gently, giving him a small nudge in the direction they had been going.

Anakin resumed walking, but he could feel his simple, uncomplicated delight like a warming stone inside him. “But you’re not Master Qui-Gon. He wouldn’t want you to turn it down because it’s what he did.”

Obi-Wan shook her head, looking introspective. “No, I don’t suppose that he would have.”

“Just promise me that you won’t get boring once you’re Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi of the High Council,” Anakin grinned, punching the button to open the doors to the loading bay. His astromech chirped a greeting, while Obi-Wan’s flashed the lights in her starfighter at them. “Does this mean that we actually get a choice in where we’re deployed?”

“Hello there.” This was directed at her astromech, which from quick inspection seemed to be an R4 unit rather than the R3 in Anakin’s fighter. To Anakin, she added, “It’s unlikely. On both counts, although you did once tell me that I was the most boring Jedi that you had ever met.”

“I was nine years old!” Anakin said indignantly. “I’d only _met_ two Jedi! And of course I thought Master Qui-Gon was way more rugged than you, he let me podrace and freed me and fought that Zabrak, all you did was look disapproving and take up Padmé’s time.”

“I _was_ assigned to be her bodyguard,” Obi-Wan pointed out, her voice dry.

“You didn’t even know that Padmé was the real Queen Amidala.”

“Neither did you or Qui-Gon. And it only took me ten minutes alone with Sabé and the handmaidens to work it out, anyway.” She grinned. “Not that you or Qui-Gon were going to get that opportunity.”

“I was alone with Padmé!” Anakin protested.

Obi-Wan rolled her eyes. “You didn’t even know there was a Queen of Naboo until Qui-Gon told you she was onboard.”

“Actually, it was Padmé – you know what, never mind. I can’t believe you remember that,” he added, putting a hand on the side of his starfighter and vaulting into the cockpit. He reached for his comlink band, settling it over his forehead and pushing at it until it was comfortable.

“You have to admit that you made quite the impression on me, though I doubt that it was the one either of us wanted at the time,” Obi-Wan said, climbing more sedately into her own cockpit. She glanced over her shoulder. “Anakin, you launch first; you’re closer to the doors and frankly you’re the better pilot. I probably need a little more space to get straightened out before I can exit. This ship was not meant to hold starfighters; I’m astonished that both of us managed to fit in here without destroying something in the process.”

“So am I, to be honest,” Anakin said, then the canopy of his starfighter closed down over him. He glanced out the transparisteel, tapping a finger against his comlink as Obi-Wan met his eyes, pulling her own canopy closed. “Testing?”

_“Loud and clear,”_ Obi-Wan said. She made a “go on” gesture with her hands and Anakin gave her a thumbs up in reply.

There wasn’t enough room to turn around in the Peregrine’s bay from his current position, so he had to back out into space, which was a tricky procedure that had him grinding his teeth and his astromech chirping in worry. By the time that he had cleared the magnetic shield, he was furiously glad that he hadn’t attempted this maneuver in atmosphere, since with any kind of gravity he and his starfighter would have dropped like a rock as soon as they were out of the bay.

With his starfighter gone, there was enough space for Obi-Wan to turn hers around in small, tight circles until she was facing open space. Anakin waited until he was sure that she could launch normally and then flew a few lazy loops around the Peregrine, cataloguing the damage that the other ship had received in the firefight. There wasn’t much, mostly superficial – the pirates, or whoever they had been, had been aiming to board and capture the ship, not disable or destroy it. If the Peregrine had been able to jump to hyperspace as soon as the attack began, they might have gotten away without a scratch. But they hadn’t.

Obi-Wan’s starfighter emerged from the launch bay, the loading ramp coming up a few seconds after she had cleared it. From long practice, she and Anakin settled easily into escort position on either side of the Peregrine. He shifted a little in his seat, nervous about not being able to see her when he couldn’t sense her in the Force, but her starfighter was clearly illuminated on his viewscreen. It wasn’t as if anything was going to happen, since the pirates would have to be crazy to come back now.

The other starfighters had formed a loose perimeter around the Peregrine. Just beyond it sat the Galaxy 9 News cruiser, now joined by two other starships marked with the logos of various HoloNews channels. Anakin could feel the satisfaction radiating from them despite the kilometers of empty space between their positions and resigned himself to arriving on Coruscant to an audience. If Taris-Keir-Peli had any brains, and he knew from unfortunate experience that she did, then she would have contacted Senator Mothma as soon as the news about the attack had come over the emergency band. She and her news crew were probably already at the spaceport waiting for them to arrive.

_“We’re clear to depart,”_ Obi-Wan said in his ear. _“Sorry about the show, Captain Karass,”_ she added to the Chandrilan pilot.

_“Don’t worry, Master Jedi,”_ he said. _“I’ve been working for Senator Mothma a long time. We all know how this game is played.”_

“Palpatine’s not going to like this,” Anakin said, just to Obi-Wan. He watched the news cruisers spread themselves out around them, moving to get the best angles of the three ships as they made their way to Coruscant. He hoped that they were going to get bored at some point, but – probably not, knowing the press.

_“Well, he shouldn’t,”_ Obi-Wan replied calmly. “It’s his mess to clean up. If he doesn’t, Mon will be well within her rights to call for a Vote of No Confidence.”

“She wouldn’t do that!” Anakin said, startled. “Would she?”

_“That depends on how the Supreme Chancellor reacts.”_

As soon as they were clear of the perimeter – he didn’t know what Windu and the clones expected to find, but sending the squad back to the Home Fleet after Obi-Wan had made such a production of getting them called out would have been stupid – he keyed his comlink for a ship to ship call and said, “Hey, Master. Did you notice that that Rohane woman with the staff was a Force user?”

Obi-Wan made a noise of assent and said, sounding a little cagy, _“Many worlds have developed indigenous Force traditions. Quinlan Vos –”_ She hesitated for a moment; the Kiffar Jedi Master had been Obi-Wan’s best friend before he had gone over to the Separatists last year. _“Kiffu has the Guardians, of course; they’ve got some peculiar Force talents, though most Kiffar aren’t Force-sensitive. Teräs Käsi uses Force techniques, though not all practitioners are Force-sensitive. Has Plo Koon ever told you about the Baran Do on Dorin? He trained with them for a time.”_

“I read about it somewhere,” Anakin said. “But aren’t most of those Mid Rim or Outer Rim worlds? Chandrila’s in the Core. I’ve always heard that most Core Worlds are happy to send their children to the Temple, so they don’t develop Force practices of their own.” He paused, considering. “Is there much about the protectorates in the Archives? I thought they were Chandrila’s dirty little secret; I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Rohane Jedi Knight.”

_“Anakin.”_ There was a hint of amusement in Obi-Wan’s voice. _“You’re speaking to one.”_

“What, _you_?” Anakin said, disbelieving. “But you’re –”

_“Planet of origin isn’t really supposed to matter for Jedi, my young Padawan,”_ Obi-Wan reminded him. _“And most of the time it has no effect on our lives. After all, few of us came to the Temple old enough to remember what – or where – we were before we did so.”_

Anakin himself being one of the Order’s rare exceptions, he knew. He cleared his throat and said, “Isn’t the, uh – the dead woman –” He still didn’t know her name. “– your birth-sister, I mean – isn’t she Chandrilan? She was part of Senator Mothma’s retinue.” He blinked even as he said the words; it was the second time in less than twenty-four hours that something about the Chandrilan senatorial staff had come to his and Obi-Wan’s attention. Anakin Skywalker was a Jedi. He didn’t believe in coincidences, just the Force.

_“Roah is a holding of Chandrila and has no independent representation in the Senate,”_ Obi-Wan explained. _“There’s no reason that a protectorate resident wouldn’t be part of Mon’s staff.”_ She hesitated. _“And her name was Shara-Von, by the way. Shara-Von Kenobi.”_

“Oh,” Anakin said, not really knowing how to respond to her detachment. There was no reason for her to have any real connection to her sister, identical twin or not; Obi-Wan was a Jedi Knight. Well, a Jedi Master now, which made Anakin grin to himself in the privacy of his cockpit. She really did deserve it, a lot more than some of the other Masters who had been appointed to the rank since the war began and Jedi started dying in bulk.

He dragged his mind back to the original content of the discussion. “But all those other Force traditions, Jedi have trained in them, like you said. Master – uh, Quinlan Vos comes from a family of Guardians, Master Fisto is a Teräs Käsi adept, Master Koon is a Baran Do initiate or whatever they’re called. But you didn’t train with the Rohane –” He paused, trying to remember what the woman had called herself. “Lamarry? Did you?”

_“Lamarie,”_ Obi-Wan corrected. _“And no, I didn’t. From the little I know of the lamariex, they train on a one on one basis, like Jedi masters and padawans. There’s no central academy or temple. It may even be more informal than that.”_ She paused. _“According to the records in the Archives, most lamariex aren’t as strong in the Force as even the weakest Jedi Knight. In consequence, their use of the Force is very different than ours.”_

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

_“Not really. I looked it up once when I was a Padawan. If I hadn’t been discovered by the Jedi, after all, I would have been one.”_

That was an odd thought. Anakin could easily imagine how his life would have turned out if Qui-Gon Jinn hadn’t won him from Watto and brought him to Coruscant; he would probably still be a slave, albeit a podracing champion. Even if the Jedi had refused to take him as a Padawan after Qui-Gon’s dying request, he could see two possible ways that his life might have played out, depending on what Obi-Wan chose to do. There was a Force technique for seeing possible futures – or pasts. If Obi-Wan, traumatized by her Master’s murder and newly knighted, had complied with the Council’s decision and let Anakin go, he would have remained on Naboo; by now he might be a pilot in the Royal Naboo Security Forces. He might even have married Padmé after all. It would have been a good life, he admitted, feeling it flash through the Force, a series of images and impressions that left him slightly breathless with distracted longing. The Clone Wars – well, they wouldn’t have passed him by, but he wouldn’t be so deeply entrenched in them as he was as a Jedi. But if Obi-Wan had disobeyed the Council and trained him anyway, as a Gray Jedi – that was the usual term for Jedi that operated outside the Council’s bounds – Force save him, that was a strange thought. He could see himself as a Gray Jedi, easily, but Obi-Wan –

Even using the Force, it was hard for Anakin to see Obi-Wan as anything but what she was now.

_“Anakin?”_ Obi-Wan’s voice said. _“You’re being uncharacteristically quiet. Is something wrong?”_

“Just thinking about might-have-beens, Master.”

_“Dwelling on lives that never were gains nothing but regret, my young Padawan,”_ Obi-Wan said, and in her voice Anakin heard the memory of countless sleepless nights spent reviewing the mistakes of their shared past. He had more than a few of his own, many recently.

“Yeah,” he said, the words heavy on his tongue. “I know.”

Obi-Wan made a sympathetic noise, made tinny by the comlink. _“We are where the Force means us to be, Anakin.”_

Jedi platitudes, Anakin thought, but couldn’t bring himself to be irritated. The past _was_ past, after all; even a Jedi couldn’t change that.

Mistaking his silence, Obi-Wan said, _“I did have a choice, Anakin. Qui-Gon offered me the opportunity to return to Roah and live with – with my birth-family for a trial period, to see if I wanted to remain with the Jedi. He said that too few Jedi had any real idea what they were giving up.”_

Instinct, training, and forward momentum kept the starfighter from stopping dead in space as Anakin gaped. “Qui-Gon Jinn said that? A _Jedi Master_ said that?”

Obi-Wan made a sound that Anakin couldn’t identify. _“It’s not a very popular opinion. I only know of a handful of other Jedi who thought likewise at the time.”_

“Did you?” Anakin said, fascinated. “Do it, I mean.”

_“No, of course not!”_ Obi-Wan sounded appalled by the suggestion, though Anakin still couldn’t read her in the Force. He would have given a lot in order to be able to sense the emotional overtones of a reply with that much virulence. More softly, she added, _“Anakin, I have only ever wanted to be a Jedi Knight. If I had left, even temporarily, then the High Council would have been well within its rights to forbid my return to the Order, even if Qui-Gon had managed to conceal it from them, which I don’t believe that he had any intention of doing. I didn’t want to, anyway.”_ She repeated softly, _“I have only ever wanted to be a Jedi.”_

“You never gave me that option,” Anakin mused.

_“I never considered that you wanted it,”_ she said, surprised. _“I thought you knew well enough what your life outside the Order would have been. Besides, you’ve been back to Tatooine since.”_

Anakin winced at the mention of Tatooine, glad that Obi-Wan couldn’t see the gesture. “No, Master, you’re right. I do know what life outside the Temple is like. The Order is better.” He checked the readouts on his starfighter’s console; they were just over halfway to Coruscant. They were making the return much more slowly than they had made the outward journey, since there was no need for them to push their ships to maximum speed. He glanced out the cockpit, even though his viewscreen told him well enough that the news vessels were still tracking them. At least Jedi encryption was supposedly unbreakable; the last thing he wanted was the press listening in on his and Obi-Wan’s conversation.

They passed the rest of the journey in silence. Half a dozen hyperspace routes terminated in the Coruscant system, which was sometimes called the center of the galaxy – Triple Zero, in clone slang, for its coordinates. Despite the disturbance at the end of the Perlemian Trade Route, which passed through the Chandrila system, the others remained in constant operation; there was a steady passage of ships blipping in and out of hyperspace throughout the system. Others waited outside the boundary set by the Home Fleet, waiting for their entry clearance to make planetfall. The cruiser’s diplomatic tags and the Jedi escort allowed them to bypass this, along with the usual landing procedures that might have kept them in orbit around the planet for the better part of an hour.

The three ships drifted lazily down through atmosphere, still accompanied by the news cruisers, which Anakin had been more than half-hoping would be delayed by Planetary Defense. No such luck; two more appeared once they had entered Coruscant airspace; Anakin didn’t know if they had been tapping the same emergency band that Taris-Keir-Peli had or if they were just attracted by the unusual sight of a pair of Jedi starfighters escorting a diplomatic cruiser. They flocked around the three ships as they made their way to the Galactic City Spaceport, where they were waved off by spaceport security as the Peregrine and the two starfighters continued to descend into a landing bay in the skydock reserved for senators, their staff, and other diplomats.

Waiting for them on the platform was a squad of clone troopers led by a human woman in a naval uniform, accompanied by an emergency medical unit – more clones, Anakin saw; on Coruscant it was usually about even odds whether responders from the military would be clones or medical droids. Further back, out of the immediate line of fire, was Senator Mothma, flanked by a quartet of blue-garbed Senate Guards, anonymous beneath their cloaks and face-concealing helmets. Set up to the side were the Cerean host of the Galaxy 9 evening news, Taris-Keir-Peli, and two holocamera operators, a male Wookiee and a human woman whose name Anakin couldn’t remember. One of the holocameras swung around to focus on the Jedi as they brought their starfighters down together beside the Peregrine, almost but not quite in perfect sync. Anakin glared at them through the transparisteel of his cockpit, unstrapping himself from his seat and taking off his comlink band. He hoped that they weren’t broadcasting live.

He took a deep breath, bracing himself for what was coming, and popped the canopy of his cockpit, letting in a breath of steamy Coruscant air as he clambered out of the starfighter. To his right, Obi-Wan was doing the same thing, sweeping her hair out of her face with a practiced gesture. She only glanced at the holocameras long enough to make sure that they got a clear look at her face, then smoothed her robes down and strode over to Anakin’s side. Mon Mothma glanced at them, then fixed her gaze steadily back on the Peregrine, which was descending ore slowly than the two starfighters had.

“Good flight?” Anakin muttered to Obi-Wan, tucking his hands into the sleeves of his cloak. The weight of his lightsaber on his belt was comforting. Something in the Force tugged at him; he stretched out absently with his mind, but it slipped out of reach and he let it go.

“Uneventful,” she replied. Her gaze flickered to the holocameras again and she sighed. “I hate those things,” she said softly.

“Me too,” Anakin said. “But Palpatine says that the Jedi have to be made the public face of the war, though. Otherwise it’s just clones and droids fighting somewhere far away and no one in the Core will care.”

“Don’t parrot the Chancellor at me, my young Padawan!” Obi-Wan snapped, though her voice didn’t rise in pitch. “I have the HoloNet for that; I don’t need it from you as well.”

Anakin glanced down, biting his lip, then turned his attention to the Peregrine as the loading ramp descended. Immediately the ship was swarmed by the clone squadron, DC-15 blaster rifles raised to their shoulders. Anakin sighed, knowing what they would find and wondering if they were about to be reprimanded by the naval officer for not staying onboard to make sure that the captured pirates stayed secure. After several minutes, in which the clones had apparently made certain that the ship and crew were otherwise unharmed, one of the med-trained clones motioned his comrades forward. They disappeared up the landing ramp, accompanied by several repulsorlift stretchers.

As soon as they were out of sight, the senatorial aide Ras Ulina and the still-unnamed Rohane Force came down the loading ramp. The pilot and copilot followed afterwards, though they lingered by the side of the ship as the other two made their way to greet Mon Mothma.

The senator strode forwards with her hands outstretched, kissing each woman on the cheek and murmuring a few words to the Rohane woman. After a moment, the _lamarie_ stepped back and executed an elaborate bow after a fashion Anakin had never seen before. Looking faintly startled, Mon Mothma returned the salaam, though with slightly less grace. Straightening up, she directed the two women towards a waiting airspeeder in the company of two of the Blues. The remaining pair hung back as she made her way over to Anakin and Obi-Wan, the movement tracked by one of the holocameras.

“Obi-Wan, Anakin,” she said, holding her hands out. Obi-Wan, smiling, bowed over them and caught Mon Mothma’s slender fingers in her own. “I’m so glad that you aren’t dead!”

Obi-Wan pressed a kiss to the backs of her palms and released them. “The feeling is mutual, Senator, I assure you.”

“And coming to my rescue once again, I see,” Mothma said, extending her hands to Anakin. He repeated Obi-Wan’s gesture, his smile genuine. Mon Mothma was part of Padmé’s set, along with Obi-Wan, Bail Organa, and a number of other notables in Coruscanti society that Anakin knew well enough to recognize on sight, though he was only personally familiar with a handful. “What would I ever do without the Jedi?”

“I pray that we’ll never find out, Senator,” Obi-Wan said. There was a strange timbre to her voice; it might have been prescience. Anakin felt the hair rise on the back of his neck as his own precognitive ability responded to it, but no visions followed. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

Made uneasy by this, he said, “Thanks for giving us an excuse to leave the Temple and get some real flying in, Senator.”

“As ever, Master Skywalker, I aim to please,” Mothma said, a smile stretching her lips. Louder, pitched to carry to the holocameras’ microphones, she said, “Chandrila thanks you for your extraordinary service, Master Jedi. We owe you a great debt.”

“The honor is ours, Senator Mothma,” Obi-Wan said, shooting another practiced smile at the cameras.

A fleeting sense of apology was all that Anakin sensed from Mothma before she went on, “And of course, Master Kenobi, I must congratulate you on your recent elevation. The Jedi Council is lucky to have you.”

Obi-Wan’s smile took on a fixed quality, but her thanks sounded genuine. Mothma kissed her on the cheek – Anakin was certain that he saw her whisper something in Obi-Wan’s ear – and the two Jedi bowed again before the Senator went over to exchange a few words to the pilots.

Taris-Keir-Peli swooped down on them as soon as Mothma departed, clearly struggling with which of her numerous questions to ask first. “General Kenobi, have you really been appointed to the Jedi High Council?” she said the moment she was close enough to be certain the microphone she was holding would pick up Obi-Wan’s every word. “You’re quite young for it, aren’t you?”

Obi-Wan smiled the smile that had made her the darling of the media and the public face of the Jedi Order, her cheeks dimpling and her eyes widening a little, so that even sleep-deprived and fresh out of a starfighter cockpit she could have stepped off the cover of a holomagazine. Well. Anakin was clear-eyed enough to admit that he might be a little prejudiced on that front.

“I’m afraid that I can’t discuss internal Jedi affairs until the Temple has made a public statement,” she said, which was as good as affirmative and all of them knew it.

Taris-Keir-Peli’s smile deepened. “Can you discuss the reports that you were killed in action on the planet of Jabiim, General? Your name was on a list publicly released by the Jedi and the War Office over a month ago.”

“Madam,” Obi-Wan said sweetly, parroting their earlier exchange, “I can only say that rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated. I’m afraid that further details are classified.”

“Is it true that you were taken captive by one of Count Dooku’s Dark Jedi?” Her gaze raked across Obi-Wan, searching for evidence to back up one rumor or another, and fixed on Obi-Wan’s shorn hair.

“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Obi-Wan said, though her smile went brittle for an instant. Anakin felt his fists clench inside the sleeves of his cloak, wondering where Taris-Keir-Peli had heard about that – who had talked. It wasn’t supposed to be common knowledge even among the Jedi, though Force knew Jedi gossiped like the slaves back on Tatooine.

Taris-Keir-Peli dipped her oblong head, acknowledging the double-talk. “General, is there a reason that you and your apprentice were the first to respond to today’s attack on a Chandrilan diplomatic cruiser? You and Senator Mon Mothma are close friends, aren’t you?”

“Senator Mothma and I are friends, yes,” Obi-Wan said. “But it was luck rather than anything more sinister. Anakin and I –” she laid a hand on his elbow and he turned to look at her, feeling his body curve familiarly in towards hers without conscious thought, “– were in the starfighter staging area at the Temple when the all-call alarm sounded. We were able to react immediately, fortunately for the cruiser.”

“And of course the Jedi aren’t bound by the new planetary response zone when they aren’t flying as part of the Home Fleet squadrons?” Taris-Keir-Peli said – baiting, Anakin thought.

He leaned forward to respond and she twitched the microphone appropriately in his direction. “There aren’t any Jedi in the Home Fleet,” he said. “Planetary Defense decided it would be inefficient to keep Knights on standby here on Coruscant when they could be fighting on the front.”

“But there are Jedi Knights stationed on Coruscant.”

“Yeah, there are. Homeworld defense and anti-terrorism and military advisers, that sort of thing,” Anakin said. “They’re just not part of the Home Fleet.”

Obi-Wan made a slight gesture with her chin, so that Taris-Keir-Peli tipped the microphone back towards her. “The new planetary response zone is harmful to the well-being of this system,” she said. “While a Separatist attack this deep in the Core is unlikely, one of the unforeseen consequences of the war is an increase in pirate activity on previously protected hyperlanes. I think you’ll find that attacks at hyper-points within the Republic, even in the Core, have gone up by sixty percent since the war began last year. It’s clear that pirates have discovered that the new planetary response zone leaves several of the hyper-points in the Coruscant system vulnerable, including the Perlemian Trade Route, as we found today. If Planetary Defense doesn’t act immediately to remedy this, I fear that today’s attack will only be the beginning. Trade and shipping, after all, make up a major portion of Coruscant’s economy, and of course this system acts as a hub for half a dozen major hyperlanes. If freighters and passenger liners believe that this system is no longer safe to use, it could have significant repercussions on travel within the Republic.”

Taris-Keir-Peli looked thrilled that she had gotten the soundbite that would no doubt be playing across every HoloNet band in the galaxy by this time tomorrow. “General Kenobi –” she began.

Obi-Wan cut her off with a gesture, still smiling that practiced smile. “I’m afraid that my apprentice and I can’t answer any more questions right now. As ever, Taris-Keir-Peli, I’m glad to find you in good health.” She bowed, Anakin following a beat behind.

Taris-Keir-Peli waved the holocamera operator away and lowered her microphone, clicking it off with her thumb. “Off the record, Obi-Wan, _are_ you all right? What happened on Jabiim?”

Obi-Wan let the smile slide away. “It really is classified,” she said apologetically. “But I’m not injured.”

Anakin frowned at her, but didn’t say anything.

Taris-Keir-Peli turned towards him. “I saw the casualty list from Jabiim. I know –”

“I can’t talk about it,” Anakin said, biting off the words more sharply than intended. He saw Obi-Wan’s gaze slide towards him, her brow wrinkling in concern. Abruptly, he realized that she had never let go of his arm, her touch light and familiar through the thick layers of fabric between them.

Taris-Keir-Peli glanced between them and apparently came to a decision. “Well, I’ve got to try and catch Senator Mothma or one of the pilots anyway. Thanks for the exclusive, Obi-Wan,” she added, giving them a little wave before trotting off towards Mon Mothma.

Obi-Wan turned towards him, her hand slipping down from his arm to his wrist, lingering for an instant before she released him. “Do you –” she started, then she stopped and shook her head. “Never mind. Let’s go home.”

Anakin glanced back at the Peregrine, where the clone medics were bringing the injured out on repulsorlift stretchers. Mon Mothma saw them and immediately turned around, going to the side of the nearest wounded guard and taking his hand, pacing the stretcher as they moved towards an ambulance.

Obi-Wan touched Anakin’s arm again. “If we stay here, Taris-Keir-Peli’s going to come back,” she murmured, “or that naval officer will decide to take us in for questioning. I, for one, am not terribly entranced by either option.”

Anakin made a face.

They flew back to the Temple, their starfighters clearing plenty of space in the always crowded Coruscant skylanes. A starfighter wasn’t much bigger than a regular airspeeder, but they were seldom seen on Coruscant. Thanks to the HoloNet, almost everyone on the planet knew the characteristic look of a Delta-7 Aethersprite light interceptor, which was almost exclusively flown by Jedi and usually just shorthanded as the Jedi starfighter. The sight of one on Coruscant, even just a short hop from the Galactic City Spaceport to the Jedi Temple, caused speeders to swerve out of the way in alarm, disrupting the usually well-ordered skylanes in alarm. Anakin resisted the urge to laugh, which would be unkind, or even to do a few tricks, which would have been worse – but very, very amusing. It would also undoubtedly cause some kind of antigrav accident, which was the last thing that the Jedi needed to be blamed for. CSF was chronically unhappy with the Jedi as it was; Anakin didn’t need to give them another excuse.

They landed back in the starfighter staging area, where for once Anakin was glad to turn his borrowed starfighter over to the maintenance crew. “Well, that was fun,” he said, stretching with his arms up over his head and hearing his back pop. At least he hadn’t had to sleep in his starfighter this time. “After a manner of speaking.”

Obi-Wan shrugged her cloak off and draped it over one arm, fingering the hole a stray blaster bolt had left behind. “No accounting for taste, I suppose,” she grinned. An instant later her smile vanished. “Do you want to talk about what happened out there?”

The words were like a slap in the face. “No,” Anakin said abruptly. He still couldn’t feel Obi-Wan; she was an empty space in the Force beside him. She had to know it; he just didn’t want to say the words out loud. It would flip back to normal sooner or later.

She hesitated. “Anakin –”

“It’s not going to happen again. I don’t want to talk about it,” he said abruptly. “I made a mistake. It won’t happen again, I swear.”

Obi-Wan looked down at her hands. “If – we’re going to deploy again soon. For a Jedi, if –”

“Master, I said I didn’t want to talk about it! And it won’t happen again.”

“It might.” Her voice was so soft that Anakin could barely hear it.

He shook his head fiercely. “I’ve got to – I’ve got to look at my starfighter again. I thought I heard something flapping on the wing,” he invented.

He turned away quickly, but not before he saw the open, broken expression on Obi-Wan’s face. “I’m going to take a shower and write my after action report,” she said to his back. “Don’t forget to do your AAR.”

“What, you don’t want me to do yours too?” Anakin quipped, though it was half-hearted and both of them knew it. “I thought that was what padawans were for.”

“Don’t be impertinent, youngling,” Obi-Wan said. Anakin heard the smile in her voice, was starting to turn in order to return it, and then she added, “I think I’ll see what I can find out about the murders that Mace mentioned.”

He flinched at the word “murder” and stopped where he was, pressing his gloved hand over his mouth as his breath stuttered out. For a moment he was back on Jabiim, explosions raining burning shrapnel down on him, with a rip in his mind that was worse than any wound he had ever received, even the loss of his arm. There hadn’t been a body to recover, but now Anakin saw the hologram the CSF lieutenant had showed them, except it wasn’t a stranger lying dead in front of him, it was Obi-Wan, her face slack and her eyes open, staring sightlessly at nothing.

He couldn’t feel her in the Force.

“Anakin?” Obi-Wan said. She sounded faintly puzzled, a little concerned, but there were no emotional overtones to it, nothing in the Force that even hinted at her presence in the hanger. Anakin might as well have been listening to a holovid. “Are you all right?”

“Of course,” Anakin said, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. He turned back to her, fixing a smile on his face. “I’m always all right.”

*

As a junior member of Mon Mothma’s staff, Shara-Von wasn’t rich enough or high-ranking enough to have a suite in 500 Republica, the most exclusive residential apartment on Coruscant. Instead she had kept a flat in another apartment building in the Ambassadorial Sector, Galactic Court, which was impressive enough to Ina-Rati’s provincial protectorate eyes: four hundred stories of luxury apartments, mostly serving senators and staff who couldn’t afford to live in 500 Republica. Another one of Mothma’s aides, a pink Twi’lek woman named Griaa Tudela, brought her there in an airspeeder and let her into Shara-Von’s flat, handing over the keycard ceremoniously.

“We had to slice the security system in order to get in,” she said apologetically, pointing to the small control beside the door. “It’s voice-coded – I’ll show you how to reprogram it so that you don’t have CSF called out every time you open the door.”

She gave Ina-Rati a quick tour around the flat – sitting room, bedroom, kitchen, refresher. “I brought some takeout menus for you,” she added, sounding faintly anxious. “Shara-Von has a garage unit too, but it’s empty. CSF hasn’t found her vehicle yet, so I brought a couple of brochures for speeder rental companies. There are some hovercab dials too, in case you don’t want to drive on Coruscant – a lot of people don’t. It can be pretty crazy.”

“I bet,” Ina-Rati said, glancing out the window at the endless skylanes, a hundred layers of speeders zipping by at outrageous speeds. She had thought that Alderaan was busy.

“My personal dial is there too, if you need anything,” Griaa said, “along with Senator Mothma’s office and personal comlink. She’s very busy, though. Please don’t disturb her unless it’s important.”

A retort sprung to Ina-Rati’s lips, then she remembered that despite the time difference Mon Mothma had personally made an interplanetary holocomm call to inform the Margravine of Shara-Von’s death. She nodded instead. “When can I see my sister?”

“I can take you to the morgue now, if you’re not too tired from your, um, adventures,” the Twi’lek woman offered. “I’ve set up a meeting with the CSF lieutenant in charge of the investigation for tomorrow morning. I’ll pick you up at nine.”

Ina-Rati paused in the act of picking up a holocube that flickered between images of the Sveasene, Ina-Rati and her nephew, and the pet eer that Shara-Von had left behind on Roah. “Are you going to be accompanying on my investigation?”

“I haven’t been ordered to, if that’s what you’re asking,” Griaa said. “I have been instructed to help you in any way that you desire, though. And,” she added, hesitating for a moment, “I thought that you might like a friend. Shara-Von was mine.”

“She was mine too,” Ina-Rati said, looking down at the holocube, which was now showing a picture of Shara-Von and their brother Kor-Zeyn. “I’m glad that she had friends here.”

“Everyone in Senator Mothma’s knows each other,” Griaa said. “There aren’t a lot of us. Shara-Von wasn’t here very long, but everyone liked her. We can’t replace her, not really.”

“No,” Ina-Rati said softly. She put the holocube back down. “You can’t.”

She wanted to go to the morgue, but she didn’t know if she would be able to bear it, looking at Shara-Von on a slab – well, in a stasis casket, she supposed, awaiting transport back to Roah for interment. As long as she didn’t see her sister’s body, she could pretend that Shara-Von was alive. She had thought that she might be able to see traces of Shara-Von’s spirit in her flat, but Griaa’s presence was blurring it. It was strange being on Coruscant; Ina-Rati had expected it to be like Alderaan, where the life of the planet was right there for her to touch, but Coruscant was far too developed, so that it pulsed awkwardly in her brain, almost like a starship, when she tried to reach out for it. The only spirits that she had been able to see clearly since arriving had been those of the two Jedi, who shone so brightly that they seemed to eclipse the planet.

“I think,” she said reluctantly, “that I’ll wait before going to the morgue – will I be able to go tomorrow, before we meet the police lieutenant?”

Griaa nodded, her lekku swaying with the motion. “Before or after. The morgue is at CSF headquarters. I’ll call and find out, then let you know. Is that all right?”

Ina-Rati nodded, looking around the room – messy, like Shara-Von always had been, with her things strewn everywhere. She felt like her sister would come back at any minute.

“Is there anything else that I can do?” Griaa asked anxiously. “I – I guess I should tell you that we looked through to make sure that Shara-Von didn’t leave anything sensitive behind – you know, things that were eyes-only for Senator Mothma’s staff. But we didn’t touch anything else. Oh, I changed the sheets on the bed. I thought that you might not want – anyway. That’s all.”

“I understand,” Ina-Rati said. “My mother is the Margravine of the Svea. The concept of eyes-only isn’t exactly alien to me.”

Griaa smiled a little. “Don’t be afraid to call me at any time,” she said. “My comlink is always on. I’ll call about the morgue – oh, do you have a comlink? Shara-Von has a holoprojector, I’m sure it’s around here somewhere –” She glanced around, pointing it out when she found it on a shelf between a landscape holo of a planet Shara-Von didn’t recognize and a potted plant that she couldn’t identify either.

“I’ve got a comlink,” Ina-Rati said, and wrote down the dial for Griaa on the datapad that the other woman produced, the odd-shaped stylus a little awkward between her fingers. She handed them back to Griaa and swallowed, looking around again.

“I can stay if you want,” Griaa offered. “Or if you want to be alone –”

“I’ll be fine,” Ina-Rati said quickly. She forced a smile, wondering if the Twi’lek woman would take it as genuine or not. Ina-Rati wouldn’t have. “Oh – I was hoping that I could get a file on the crime syndicate whose territory Shara-Von was in. Red –”

“Crimson Arrow,” Griaa said quickly. “Of course. I’ll send it to you as soon as I get back to the Senate Building. Is there anything – oh, the security system, of course.”

After she had reprogrammed the console to respond to Ina-Rati’s voice print, she turned back towards her. “Call me any time,” she said, pressing the keycard into her palm. “I mean it.” Then she hugged Ina-Rati, quick and hard, and dashed away, her heels clicking on the hallway floor as she made her way to the turbolift.

Ina-Rati let the door slide shut behind her, dropping the keycard into the carved wooden bowl set in a niche by the door. She turned and looked at the room, pushing the heels of her hands into the skin under her eyes. The spikes of adrenaline from the pirate attack had long since faded, leaving her exhausted and a little irritable. Sweat had dried on her skin beneath her clothes. She wanted a shower, something to eat, and a nap; she didn’t want to think about the fact that she was standing in her dead sister’s flat. She didn’t want to think about Shara-Von being dead at all, or that Shara-Von hadn’t died on Roah with her family, but in some Coruscanti Underworld pit light-years away. She didn’t want to think about the fact that her sister, the lost sister, the one that Ina-Rati had never thought she would meet, was only a few kilometers away in the Jedi Temple, alive and well when her twin was dead. She wanted to let it all go.

But her mother had given her a charge, and Ina-Rati wasn’t just a grieving sister or a lamarie anymore; she was a _jaedis_. One who pays for blood with blood.

She took her hands away from her face, starting to reach for her bones before remembering that half of them had been crushed to dust in the mess of the fight. There were ways to do a reading without a full set, but those required absolute calm and stillness of mind, and Ina-Rati didn’t think she could find that now. Not here.

Instead, she reached inside herself, touching the bright core of her spirit, and looked up with her second sight. She didn’t know what she thought she might find, didn’t even know if there was something to find, but there had to be a reason that Shara-Von had gone down into the Underworld. If it had had something to do with Senator Mothma, the Senator wouldn’t have been so ready to agree to Ina-Rati’s presence on Coruscant. Ina-Rati knew her sister well enough to know that Shara-Von always had a reason for what she did.

At first her second sight seemed no different from her regular vision. To her sixth sense the room felt comfortable and lived in, traces of her sister scattered readily around it. Ina-Rati walked slowly around the sitting room, making short mental notes of what her sixth sense told her. That was the seat that Shara-Von had preferred, where she had a view of both the door and the viewscreen on the wall. Ina-Rati passed her hands over the various piles in arm’s reach of that spot – takeaway menus, several holodiscs of novels from the nearest library, a few flimsiplasts of notes from Senate committee meetings. Nothing that stood out to her second sight.

She moved into the kitchen, where nothing stood out to her either. Ina-Rati opened the fridge, swallowing half from hunger and half from grief when she saw that the shelves were still full, as though Shara-Von had been expecting to come back from to the flat and make dinner. Something caught her eye, and Ina-Rati blinked her second sight away and reached into the fridge, pulling out a plastic container whose lid had been set loosely in place. She knocked it aside and reached into the container.

She pulled out a blaster and two extra power packs.

Ina-Rati pursed her lips in a whistle. She replaced the blaster and the power packs, tipping the lid back over the container, then shut the fridge and went back to the sitting room. She didn’t need second sight for this. In the sitting room she found two more blasters, one hidden in the arm of the sofa that Shara-Von liked, and an armchair that appeared to have had the stuffing ripped out of the back and replaced with what her second sight told her was a bag of credits and another blaster, though she didn’t split it open to see.

The refresher didn’t produce any blasters, but Ina-Rati found a droid deactivator under a pile of towels and a vibroblade tucked against the back of the mirror. She fingered the hilt, thoughtfully, then replaced it and stepped back out into the sitting room. That just left the bedroom.

Even if Griaa hadn’t said that she had changed the sheets, Ina-Rati would have known that. Shara-Von had never made her bed in her life. Ina-Rati stood in the doorway and looked at the bed with its military-neat corners, the pillows that had been expertly fluffed and the duvet that had been turned back invitingly. She half-expected to find a sweet on the pillow – there wasn’t, but if Ina-Rati knew her sister, there’d be a bag of them in the drawer of the nightstand.

Slowly, she let her second sight return. Here, in her bedroom, the traces of Shara-Von’s spirit were strongest. Her shockstaff was leaning up in a corner of the room. Ina-Rati knew without looking that there would be another blaster in her nightstand, probably right next to the bag of sweets. She wondered if Griaa had spotted it, if the Twi’lek woman had thought to question its presence in a politician’s room.

On the other hand, rumor was that politics was a bloody game these days. Maybe it was normal on Coruscant. For all Ina-Rati knew, Mon Mothma had an arsenal in her own bedroom, though the Chandrilan senator didn’t strike her as the type. But you could never tell with people.

Ina-Rati blinked her second sight away. There wasn’t anything here that she needed it for; she already knew all her sister’s hiding places. She and Shara-Von hadn’t had to share a bedroom the way some of her friends had, but she had snuck into her sister’s room plenty of times anyway to borrow something or another. That – and they had been trained by the same people back on Roah.

She crossed quickly to the bed, crouching down beside it and running her fingers beneath the frame until they caught on something that oughtn’t to have been there. Ina-Rati pried the little panel loose by touch and reached into the cavity it created, trying not to wince at the awkward angle it made her wrist bend. Her fingers closed on a handful of datachips and she drew them out, frowning. For lack of anything else to do with them, she dumped them on the bed and sat back on her heels, staring at them for a moment before checking the rest of the bed, where she found another cache, this time with a tiny holdout blaster and a wallet of credit chips.

Shara-Von had been good with a blaster, but it wasn’t her preferred weapon. Ina-Rati checked the drawer in the nightstand, where she found exactly what she had been expecting: a bag of sweets, another blaster, a handful of extra power packs, and a datapad. Ina-Rati left the sweets and the blaster where they were, dropping the datapad on the bed beside the datachips, and turned her attention to the walk-in closet.

This would probably have been custom work, since Ina-Rati doubted that it had come with Shara-Von’s little modifications. She hit the control for the door, barely glancing at the clothes that she scooped off the rack and dumped on the floor behind her, heedless of whether or not she wrinkled them. The false back of the closet wasn’t immediately evident, but Ina-Rati had done some quick calculations and come to the conclusion that there was at least half a meter of space unaccounted for between this and the connecting wall. It took a minute and her sixth sense to find the latch, but eventually she got the false wall to slide aside.

The weapons rack was the first thing to get Ina-Rati’s attention, since it was at eye level directly in front of her. It boasted several blaster rifles, one of which was a heavy duty hunting rifle usually used for sabat back on Roah and was probably illegal on Coruscant. The sniper rifle definitely was. There was an empty space on the rack exactly the size of a coiled shockwhip, Shara-Von’s weapon of choice, and another one where a blaster had probably hung. Ina-Rati touched the bare metal, reaching out with her second sight, but only got the brief impression of Shara-Von’s hand taking the weapon from the rack. So she hadn’t been unarmed when she had died, at least. That was good to know. It hadn’t helped Shara-Von, but at least she hadn’t been unarmed.

Along with the weapons rack were the other accoutrements of Shara-Von’s former trade – grapple hooks, laser cutters, syntherope, fingersnips, and so on. Ina-Rati felt her mouth curve up in a smile. Her sister had sworn that she was going to Coruscant to play Chandrilan politics on the galactic level. That didn’t mean that she had left Roah unprepared for the worst.

A moment later the smile slid away. The worst had happened. All the preparation in the world hadn’t saved Shara-Von from it.

Ina-Rati was contemplating this when she saw the hair extensions.

She picked one up curiously, matching the long locks against her own hair, which had a little more red in it than Shara-Von’s did, and wondering what her sister had meant them for. She could easily have left them on her vanity without raising any eyebrows if it was just for public appearances, which meant that Shara-Von had probably meant them for some other purpose. Ina-Rati replaced them, frowning, eyed the empty wig stand dubiously, and picked up the box of datachips beside them. All of them were labeled with single aurabesh letters, which was less than helpful if you didn’t know what they stood for. Unfortunately, Ina-Rati didn’t.

She took the box back to the bed and picked up the datapad she’d taken from the nightstand, letting her sixth sense guide her as she typed in Shara-Von’s password. When she slipped a datachip chosen at random in, it displayed a set of video files. Ina-Rati chose the first.

It was obviously a copy of a HoloNews broadcast, since the network logo was visible in the corner of the screen. Ina-Rati watched it – not very long, only two minutes – and felt her mouth settle into a frown as she did so. When it had finished, she watched the next video, and the one after that. The fourth one was Shara-Von herself, frowning into the camera she had set up.

_“Vocal test one,”_ she said, her voice so familiar that it tore at Ina-Rati’s heart, _“based off footage taken after the Battle of Ohma-D’un.”_ She pursed her lips, her gaze obviously elsewhere, and, accent shifting, said, _“Get that thing out of here before I put my lightsaber through it. Murdered Gungan children aren’t ratings fodder, and neither are dead Jedi and clone troopers.”_

Ina-Rati flinched. Yesterday she wouldn’t have known the woman that her sister was attempting to imitate. Today she was more familiar with her than she had ever thought she would be.

Shara-Von swept her short hair out of her face with a deliberate, unnecessary gesture that still seemed unpracticed, looked straight at the camera, and said in a credible imitation of the twin sister that she had, to the best of Ina-Rati’s knowledge, never met, _“My name is Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.”_


	4. Chapter 4

Now that Ina-Rati knew what she was looking for, she went back through all the material Shara-Von had secreted away, trying to work out why in the names of the thousand ancestors her sister had been interested in committing a crime even more illegal than usual. Shara-Von had dozens of vidclips of her twin, some of them dating back decades; the earliest showed a small, serious-looking teenager in Jedi robes, almost out of sight behind a much older male Jedi who must have been her Knight-Master. Ina-Rati found his name amidst the holofiles that Shara-Von had compiled: Qui-Gon Jinn, a human who had died under mysterious circumstances eleven years ago during the Battle of Naboo, leaving behind an apprentice whose shock and grief was evident even in decade-old holos taken at some distance. Ina-Rati had been in university then; she vaguely remembered the event making the HoloNews but hadn’t taken any notice of it at the time. She might have paid more attention if she had known that the lost sister was there; at that age she had lost some of the bitterness that had accompanied the realization that the Jedi would never come for her as well.

Naboo was where the boy Ina-Rati had spoken to on the Peregrine first appeared in HoloNet records, standing beside his Knight-Master on the steps next to the then-Queen of Naboo. Ina-Rati found files on both of them: Padmé Amidala, now the Senator from Naboo, and Anakin Skywalker of the Jedi Order. For a short span of years immediately preceding the Battle of Geonosis, almost every holo in Shara-Von’s files showed her in the company of either Senator Amidala or her apprentice, sometimes with both. A short video taken several years ago at some senatorial occasion showed her standing in company with Amidala, Mon Mothma, and the senator from Alderaan, laughing at something one of the others had said. It was the first time in the vids that Ina-Rati had seen her smile. She looked more like Shara-Von when she smiled, instead of like what she really was, a stranger wearing her sister’s face.

Scattered throughout the holovids on the datachips were more vids that Shara-Von had made of herself, sometimes wearing the hair extensions that Ina-Rati had found, sometimes not. Her sister _was_ good, Ina-Rati had to admit, watching Shara-Von try to adapt her twin’s confident stride as she paced across her sitting room. She would never be able to fool someone with the second sight – Ina-Rati had found out today just how brightly the Jedi shone to her sixth sense – but someone untalented would probably be convinced.

By the time that she had reached the vids taken just before the beginning of the Clone Wars, Ina-Rati’s exhaustion was catching up with her. She made a note of where she had been – about a third of the way through the datachips, since Obi-Wan Kenobi had been relatively well-known before the war but had become famous during it – and left the mess on the bed while she went to go investigate the kitchen again, this time with an eye to eating something. The takeaway menus that Griaa had brought were piled on the counter next to the house holocomm, but Ina-Rati didn’t feel like letting any strangers into the flat until she had found every secret Shara-Von had left behind.

She cobbled together a stir fry from what Shara-Von had left in her fridge and ate it at the kitchen table, where she found another blaster fastened beneath the table for easy access. Most people with this many weapons she would have assumed paranoid; for Shara-Von it was unsurprising, even without taking her training into consideration. Life on Roah was hard and dangerous, even for the Margravine’s children – and Shara-Von, like Ina-Rati, was the Red Woman’s daughter. Beri-Yan Kenobi hadn’t gotten the nickname solely from the color of her hair.

Shara-Von was certainly paranoid, but that didn’t mean that she had been wrong.

Ina-Rati passed a hand over her eyes, exhausted, and made herself eat the rest of the stir fry, even though it now tasted like ashes in her mouth. Her sister was dead. Her fire had gone out of the universe. There was no one else now – Ina-Rati was the last remaining daughter of the Red Woman. The lost sister didn’t count.

She dumped the dishes in the sink to soak, reaching back to pull her hair out of the tight twists that she normally kept it in. A quick shower and a change of clothes made her feel moderately less like death warmed over – she flinched at the turn of phrase – and afterwards she stood fully dressed in front of the mirror in the ‘fresher, breathing in the floral scent of the steamy air as she combed out her damp hair. When this was done, she twisted it into a dozen corkscrew knots that she pinned into place at the base of her skull and smoothed a few loose strands behind her ears.

She had done her hair by touch, but after she had finished she wiped her sleeve against the fogged-up mirror and studied her familiar face, touching her slick red hair thoughtfully. Hair extensions, she thought. When she had seen the lost sister today, the Jedi woman’s hair had been just a little past shoulder-length and held in place with a ribbon, but in most of the vids Ina-Rati had seen she had worn it in elaborate braids that kept it out of her face. In a handful it had been loose, or mostly loose, falling in a coppery-gold tumble nearly to her waist. Shara-Von would have been able to replicate the latter with the hair extensions, but she didn’t have the skill to do the braids on her own. And there had been an empty wig stand in the hidden closet.

Ina-Rati bit her lip. The hair alone wouldn’t convince anyone that Shara-Von was a Jedi Knight, not without the other accoutrements most Jedi wore, and Ina-Rati hadn’t seen Jedi robes in the closet. Nor had she seen the most important part of the ruse, the weapon that every Jedi carried. As far as Ina-Rati knew, there was no way for any non-Jedi to counterfeit a lightsaber.

Sighing, she stepped away from the mirror and depressed the controls for the ‘fresher door. Light spilled in through the sitting room’s windows; it wasn’t long past noon. Ina-Rati could have slept, but knew that it might do more harm than good in the long run. She didn’t know how long she was going to be on Coruscant. It was better to start getting used to the planet’s cycles as soon as possible, since she knew from personal experience that travel lag was no joke.

She made herself a cup of tea from a tin in the cupboard. Shara-Von must have brought it from Roah, since it was a blend that Ina-Rati had otherwise only seen in the Svea. The familiar taste comforted Ina-Rati; she shut her eyes, letting herself pretend that everything was all right, that they were girls again in the Sveasene, that Shara-Von was going to be Margravine after their mother, that Ina-Rati was going to be the greatest _lamarie_ that Roah had ever seen, that the lost sister would come home after all. It was a fantasy years out of date. Obi-Wan would never come home. Ina-Rati would never be anything more than a competent _lamarie_. Shara-Von had been the Heir, but now she was dead. 

It seemed unfair that Shara-Von was dead while her twin still drew breath. Rohane tradition held that twins were born and died together, but the lost sister wasn’t truly Shara-Von’s twin in anything but genes. She had never walked the white halls of the Sveasene, had never seen the sun shine through the morning mist over the Svea, had never hunted talat through the bayous armed with nothing but a spear. It was just blood. Blood and a stolen face.

Ina-Rati clenched one hand into a fist and pounded it on the table, making her mug jump and tea splash over the side.

For a moment she was brilliantly, scintillatingly angry. How dare that woman still be alive? How dare she, when Shara-Von was dead? Didn’t she know that she ought to have died too? Why was she alive and _here_ , of all the planets in the galaxy, all the battlefields where Jedi were fighting and dying, why Coruscant? Why now?

Heedless of the fact that half of them were destroyed, Ina-Rati grabbed for her bones, pulling the bag out from around her neck and spilling the remaining bones into her palm before flinging them across the table. _Rath_ and _merith_ , untruth and kin, _jed-qarth_ , paladin – which Ina-Rati was now certain really meant Jedi – _heth_ , danger, _dir-beth_ , traitor. All of it useless. There weren’t enough bones remaining to form a pattern that she could read.

Her fury giving her strength, Ina-Rati backhanded the empty air, her gift sending both her bones and the mug of tea flying into the opposite wall. The table even moved a few centimeters before stopping. Ina-Rati slumped down over it, pressing her hands against her damp hair. All she wanted was her big sister.

Eventually she made herself get up and clean up the mess that she had made, dumping the bones back on the table and picking up the shards of the broken mug. There was a mouse droid plugged into an outlet on the other side of the kitchen and Ina-Rati prodded at it until she found the switch to turn it on. It beeped at her, just intelligent enough to recognize her as someone other than Shara-Von.

“Sorry,” she said, stroking a hand over its chassis. “I promise I’m a friend. You think you can clean up this mess?”

It chirped confidently.

“Thanks, buddy.” Ina-Rati looked at the model number on the side. “MSE-43434? What did my sister call you, Threefour?”

It chirped again.

“Okay,” she said, patting it. “Threefour it is. I’m Ina-Rati.”

It warbled, then slid off on silent wheels to clean up the spilled tea. Ina-Rati stroked a hand over her hair, exhausted, and seriously reconsidered the nap. But it was only early afternoon. She hesitated in the doorway of the kitchen, torn between going back to the bedroom to continue going through Shara-Von’s files and try and get some idea of what her sister had been up, and doing something else, anything else.

What she ought to do was meditate.

With that realization, everything suddenly seemed much clearer to Ina-Rati. She went into the sitting room and sat down on the floor in front of the sofa, folding herself into the position known as the Floating Kirflower. Breathing in and out, counting each breath, she looked inside herself, searching out the bright core of her spirit. To her inner eye, it was a golden glowing thing, formless and weightless. Ina-Rati concentrated on that, picturing the rest of her spirit climbing inside – warm and comfortable, where nothing could ever harm her. She toyed with the idea of looking outwards; there were meditative disciplines for that purpose, but her sixth sense suggested that this time it would get her nothing. Better to look inwards. She was no Jedi Knight; there was no black pit to fall into that might consume her spirit and spit out a stranger born of devilry and dark magic, but her anger and grief were too powerful to expend until the opportune moment. It hadn’t come yet.

Eventually the beeping of her comlink dragged her back into herself. Ina-Rati stretched her arms up over her head, hearing her vertebrae pop, and reached for her comlink. Meditation wasn’t a substitute for sleep, but it had certainly helped. Her impotent fury had drained away, leaving her clear-eyed and calm.

“Yes?”

_“It’s Griaa Tudela. I just spoke to CSF, and they said that we can go to the morgue after we finish with Lieutenant De Raaha – that’s the officer in charge of the investigation. Is there anything else I can do for you?”_

“Yes,” Ina-Rati said slowly. She hadn’t reached for it, but her sixth sense had settled comfortably back inside her skin and it guided her next question. “I want to see where my sister was found. Can you take me there?”

_“To the Underworld? Now?”_

“Yes,” she repeated. “Can we do that?”

_“I don’t know,”_ Griaa said hesitantly. _“The Underworld is dangerous.”_

“I can take care of myself,” Ina-Rati said, thinking about Shara-Von’s extensive collection of weapons.

Griaa made a sound of protest. _“The Coruscant Underworld isn’t like anywhere else in the galaxy. If I ask one of the Blues to come, they’ll say no and stop us. The same with CSF.”_ She paused, obviously thinking hard.

Ina-Rati bit her lip. “I can protect us,” she said. “If you know where it is –”

_“I haven’t_ been _there!”_ Griaa said. _“I know where it is, but – oh, I know! I’ve got a friend who’s just returned to Coruscant. Give me a minute to find out if he can come, he usually doesn’t mind playing bodyguard for a favor. I’ll call you back.”_

“Okay,” Ina-Rati said dubiously, and Griaa clicked off.

She stood up and went back into the bedroom. Shara-Von’s clothes were still strewn over the floor, leaving the secret compartment in the back of the closet open. Ina-Rati regarded the weapons rack solemnly, finally reaching for a belt and thigh holster. She strapped them on, picking up a blaster and several extra power packs, then added a holdout blaster and an ankle holster. Her sister had died in the Underworld. Ina-Rati wasn’t planning to join her.

Her comlink beeped again. “Did you get hold of your friend?” Ina-Rati asked.

_“He’ll meet us at the entrance to the nearest descent corridor,”_ Griaa said, sounding relieved. _“I’ll come pick you up. I should be there in fifteen minutes. Um – I’d bring that shockstaff of yours.”_

“Believe me,” Ina-Rati said, “I have no intention of leaving this flat without it.”

By the time that Griaa arrived seventeen minutes later, Ina-Rati had returned the datachips to their hiding place, replaced the false wall over the secret compartment, and stuffed the clothes back into the closet. She didn’t like the idea of leaving it open, even if it seemed unlikely that anyone would break into the flat. Shara-Von had clearly worried that someone would do so, if the weapons hidden in every room were any indication.

Griaa glanced at the blaster Ina-Rati was wearing and visibly decided not to remark on it. “There’s a holocab waiting on this floor’s skydock,” she said as Ina-Rati stepped into the hallway, carrying her shockstaff. “I just want it on record that I’m not certain that this is a good idea.”

“You don’t have to come,” Ina-Rati said. “You can tell me how to get there and I’ll go by myself –”

The Twi’lek shook her head furiously. “No. I’m not explaining to Senator Mothma that I let you go down to the Underworld by yourself, not after what happened to Shara-Von. Oh, stang, I’m sorry, I –”

“No, it’s all right,” Ina-Rati said. “I get it.” She glanced down, studying the floral pattern of the carpet as they made their way towards the skydock. “Are you tooled up, by the way?”

“Am I – what?”

“Packing? Loaded?”

“What?”

Ina-Rati rolled her eyes. “Carrying a weapon?”

“Oh! Yes.” She didn’t specify what or where and Ina-Rati didn’t ask. “Senator Mothma requires everyone in her retinue to know self-defense. There have been some assassination attempts lately.”

Wonderful, Ina-Rati thought wearily.

They climbed into the hovercab, Griaa leaning forward to give directions to the driver. Ina-Rati glanced out the window, immediately got slightly dizzy over how high up they were and how many vehicles were zooming past, and leaned back in her seat. When Griaa glanced at her worriedly, she said, “I get airsick.”

“Oh, great,” said the driver, a furry Chadra-Fan. “Don’t you dare ralph in my cab, lady.”

“I’m not planning on it,” Ina-Rati said faintly. She shut her eyes as the hovercab pulled out of the skydock, putting a hand over her mouth as they suddenly swooped and dived down to a lower skylane. “Oh, ancestors.”

Even with her eyes shut, she was aware of Griaa watching her with what Ina-Rati suspected was a puzzled expression. “It’s funny that you don’t fly well,” she said. “Considering –”

“Considering what?” Ina-Rati cracked one eye open, caught sight of a citibike zooming past at speeds which couldn’t possibly be legal, and shut it again.

“Who your sister is.”

This time Ina-Rati actually managed to look at her, as long as she kept her eyes on Griaa’s face and didn’t let her vision stray to the speeders flashing by in the skylanes around them. “Which sister?” she said evenly.

Griaa looked uncomfortable. “Well, General Kenobi is a famous pilot,” she said tentatively. “And Shara-Von used to go to the swoop races a lot –”

“She loves those stupid things,” Ina-Rati said, deciding to ignore the first half of Griaa’s response. “She’d probably think this was fun – oh, stang!” She shut her eyes and clapped both hands over her mouth as the speeder dropped again. This time it went on for what felt like forever, until Ina-Rati was certain they were about to be squashed flat on Coruscant’s surface, leaving her mother with two daughters to inter. Just as the thought finished flashing across her mind, the speeder ground to a halt, throwing them both forward against their seatbelts.

“I ain’t going down to the Underworld, lady,” warned the Chadra-Fan driver.

Ina-Rati cracked one eye open, then the other, and saw that they were now parked on what passed for ground level on Coruscant. “Oh, ancestors,” she repeated, and more or less fell rather than climbed out of the speeder, resisting the urge to kiss the ground and leaning on her shockstaff for support.

Griaa caught her and steadied her, leaning over to pay the driver. “That’s not necessary,” she told him. “Someone’s meeting us.”

He took the payment, grunted in response, and took off.

“Are you all right?” Griaa asked, putting one arm around Ina-Rati’s shoulders.

“I just really hate flying,” Ina-Rati said. “Space is all right, but planetside is just awful. I’m surprised I didn’t throw up all over the Senator when we got here.”

“Hovercab drivers are all terrible drivers,” Griaa said sympathetically. “I think it’s a requirement to get a cab license.” She straightened up and glanced around, obviously looking for someone.

“What did you say to your friend to get him to agree to come to the Underworld, if it’s so dangerous?” Ina-Rati asked.

“He’s a Jedi,” Griaa said, standing up on tiptoe to try and peer over the crowd around them. It had scattered when the hovercab had landed, but at its departure had immediately filled back in. “Crazy and dangerous is basically their stock in trade, at least the ones I know. We’re just lucky that he’s on Coruscant right now, since he’s been gone most of the past year because of the war.”

“Your friend’s a Jedi?” Ina-Rati said, with a burst of panic in the pit of her stomach. The last thing she wanted to see right now was another blasted Jedi. Thirty years of her life had passed without ever seeing one, and now they seemed to be there every time she turned around. At least Griaa had said “he”, which meant that it couldn’t be her –

Griaa didn’t respond. She had apparently caught sight of her goal and caught Ina-Rati’s arm, tugging her along with them as they crossed the ground-level street, which more or less seemed to be used as a pedestrian walkway except for a few swoop bikes in the distance. As they pushed through the crowd of people, Ina-Rati saw their target: a battered-looking airspeeder with faded racing stripes printed on the side. A figure was leaning against it, his gaze cast down so that she couldn’t make out his face.

Ina-Rati didn’t need to reach for her second sight to see the brightness of his spirit. She actually swayed back for a moment, startled by its strength and momentarily blinded before her sense of it faded into background noise, like interference on a holoprojection.

Her teacher, who had met the Jedi Knight who had taken the lost sister away, had once told her that Jedi were different than _lamariex_ , even if they used the same basis for their powers. Ina-Rati hadn’t understood what the other woman had meant at the time. She understood now. For someone with second sight, looking at a Jedi was like looking into the face of the sun.

The man looked up at their approach, straightening up. “Hey, Griaa –” he started, then he saw Ina-Rati and stopped.

“You,” Ina-Rati burst out, too surprised to say anything else.

The last time that Ina-Rati had seen Anakin Skywalker in the flesh, he had been standing by his starfighter on the landing platform at the spaceport where the Peregrine had touched down. She had seen him rather more recently in her sister’s holofiles, but hadn’t expected to see him again in person so soon. Or at all.

He blinked at her, his expression mild and faintly interested. “That’s weird,” he said, mostly to himself. “Senator Mothma’s really calling in the favors today, huh?”

Griaa shifted a little from foot to foot. “Senator Mothma doesn’t know about this – oh, it was you and General Kenobi that saved Ras and Teg and the others, wasn’t it? Sorry, I should have thought –”

He waved it off. “The only thing going on in the Temple right now is meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. I hate meetings. You’ve saved me.” He grinned at her, friendly, then turned his attention to Ina-Rati. “Hi. We met earlier, but I didn’t get your name. I’m Anakin Skywalker.”

Ina-Rati hesitated. Griaa said, “This is Lady Ina-Rati Kenobi. She came from Roah to investigate Shara-Von’s death – um, did you hear –”

He looked like he’d been struck between the eyes, taking half a step backwards. For a brief instant, his surprise rang the inside of Ina-Rati’s head like a bell. “Kenobi? You’re Obi-Wan’s sister?” he said, then repeated it, sounding more certain now. “You’re Obi-Wan’s sister. Blast it, I should have sensed it –”

“Why?” Ina-Rati said stiffly. “I don’t think that she knows.”

“I’ve usually found that it’s better just to assume that Obi-Wan knows everything,” he said, still looking startled. “And that explains a _lot_ , starting with why she was so weird about you back on the Peregrine. She’s usually more polite. Padmé’s rubbed off on her.”

“Well, you know her better than I do,” Ina-Rati said. “Do you have a problem with this? Or me?”

“With you? No. With this? I don’t know what ‘this’ is,” he said dryly. “All Griaa said was that she had to take one of Senator Mothma’s clients down to the Underworld, could I come play bodyguard since I was planetside? And I can never say no to a pretty girl.” He grinned at Griaa. “Besides, I was never good at only hearing the beginning of a story and not the end.”

Griaa ducked her head, smiling a little. If she was physiologically capable, Ina-Rati suspected, she would be blushing. Anakin Skywalker was what was considered conventionally attractive among humans and near-humans in most parts of the galaxy: tall, well-built, with warm blue eyes and symmetrical features only a little softened by his youth. Ina-Rati put his age at no more than his last teens or early twenties, still a child by the standards of some societies. He and Griaa were probably about the same age, actually.

“The Margravine of the Svea sent Lady Ina-Rati to Coruscant to investigate Shara-Von’s death,” Griaa explained. “She wanted to see where Shara-Von died. But it’s down in the Underworld, in the lower levels, so –”

“You wanted someone to watch your back,” Anakin said, nodding. “Sure, no problem. After the front, the lower levels will be a cakewalk.”

Griaa looked a little doubtful. “I don’t think it’s anything like the front,” she began cautiously, “but –”

“Or like what Obi-Wan and I used to do before the war,” he said. “Look, a week ago I was chasing bounty hunters across a planet that was literally falling apart at the seams and hoping that I got to Obi-Wan before they blew her head off or turned her back over to Ventress. A couple of hours in the lower levels doesn’t have anything on that.” He gestured at the speeder. “Get in. You can explain the rest on the descent. All I know about the murder is that the DNA pinged back to Obi-Wan, so CSF turned up at the Temple a couple of days ago to do a death notice. They were a little surprised to find Obi-Wan there.”

Ina-Rati winced a little at the casual words, and Anakin turned a sympathetic expression on her. “Sorry. That was rude. I should have known better. Here –” He offered her a gloved hand to help her into the speeder.

She settled cautiously on one of the seats, resting her shockstaff across her knees. The inside of the speeder looked just as battered as the outside had, with the seats patched over, stuffing protruding in a few places. Griaa climbed in after her, then Anakin vaulted into the driver’s seat.

“ _This_ is the best the Jedi can do?” Ina-Rati asked.

“Griaa asked for something under the radar,” Anakin said, glancing over his shoulder as the speeder rose smoothly off the ground. “Much nicer than this and we’ll practically be begging someone to steal it from us. Besides, it’s under the hood what counts.” He patted the dashboard with a proprietary hand, his grin reflected in the rearview mirror.

Ina-Rati shut her eyes.

“Are you all right?”

“She gets airsick,” Griaa explained.

“Really?”

Ina-Rati bit back her nausea and said, “If you say one word about how your master is the best pilot in the galaxy, I’ll –”

“I _didn’t_!” the boy snapped, some of his irritation nipping at the inside of her head. Ancestors, she had never been around anyone with as much raw power as him. No _lamarie_ on Roah could compare. “And she’s not the best, anyway. I am.”

Ina-Rati got the sense that if Griaa hadn’t told him about her airsickness, he would have tried to prove it, but instead they just drifted so smoothly upwards that at first she wasn’t aware they were moving. Cautiously, she opened first one eye, then the other.

They had stopped rising and were now hovering about twenty meters above the ground. Ina-Rati swallowed and glanced, very quickly, over the side of the speeder. Below her she could see the street that they had just been standing on, but from the air she could see what hadn’t been clearly visible from their position on the ground. A few meters on from where they had been, the street just terminated in a tall duracrete barrier the height of a Wookiee, which had a warning affixed to it that she couldn’t read from this height. On the other side of the barrier was what seemed to be a pit large enough to swallow a Star Destroyer whole: perfectly round and straight-sided, apparently stretching kilometers down into Coruscant’s depths. Lights glowed from within it, like stars on a clear night, only coming from below rather than above. As Ina-Rati watched, a multi-passenger airspeeder rose straight up from within the pit, passing a freighter on its way down.

“Descent Corridor Osk, for your viewing pleasure,” Anakin said, apparently content to play tourist guide. “There are a couple dozen across the planet. Most of them started out as ventilation shafts or collecting sewage runoff; this one was built specifically for access. There’s a station over there where hovercabs pick up people and run them down to the level of their choice.” He pointed, indicating a round building about a block away from the street where they had met. “It’s supposed to be run by the planetary authority, but I think whoever’s in charge is actually in the pay of Black Sun or one of the other syndicates right now. We’re lucky that it’s too hard to regulate entrance to the Underworld, or we’d be having to pay through the nose just to get in. As it is –” He touched the speeder controls, sending them so gently forwards that Ina-Rati didn’t realize they were moving until she saw the planet’s surface sliding away beneath her, “– we can just pop in.”

Soon they were directly over the entrance to the descent corridor. They began to move purposefully downwards, darkness broken by specks of light on all sides as the round circle of the sky narrowed above them. Ina-Rati expected to feel the strength of the planet as they descended, but it was distant, still far beneath her. There was something strange about it, something…mechanical, as if it had been so many millennia since there had been anything natural about Coruscant that the planet itself had forgotten what that was like.

She saw Anakin’s gaze flicker to her in the rearview mirror. “You can sense it too, can’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” Ina-Rati admitted. “What is it? It’s – strange.”

“The planet core. It’s different on every world. Coruscant is so industrialized that sometimes it’s more like being on a starship than a planet like Naboo or Alderaan. Starships are less chaotic, though.” He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Most Jedi can’t feel it. My master says it’s an ideological difference; those of us who are trained in the Living Force are more likely to, but since we can’t really use it a lot of Jedi don’t see the point…” He trailed off. “But you aren’t a Jedi. Where are we going again?”

Ina-Rati blinked, startled by the sudden change in subject, but Griaa said immediately, “Level 782,” and gave him the coordinates. “It’s in Crimson Arrow’s territory.”

“I don’t think I’m familiar with them. Are they a syndicate or a gang?” He flicked at the navscreen on the airspeeder’s console, frowning.

“A syndicate.” Griaa pulled out her datapad with a flourish and glanced down at it as she spoke. “A gang called Emerald Star controls the next sector over and has been muscling in on their territory lately. CSF was carrying out a raid on one of their spice warehouses after what they claim was an anonymous tip but was almost certainly Crimson Arrow using them to do their dirty work when they heard blasterfire. By the time officers reached the scene, the killer had fled and Shara-Von was already dead. CSF made a preliminary ID of Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi based on visual identification from the two clone troopers present.”

“I knew _that_ part, I was there when they came to make the ident,” Anakin said. “So we’re, what, just going to look around?”

Griaa glanced at Ina-Rati.

“It feels important,” Ina-Rati said, hating how useless the answer sounded, but Anakin nodded as if that made as much sense to him as a more well-reasoned response would have done.

“And I’m here to make sure that we don’t get murdered by Crimson Arrow or Emerald Star, okay. No problem.” He glanced at the screen again. “782’s pretty deep. We’ve still got a while to go. Does CSF know that we’re here?”

“No one knows that we’re here,” Griaa said sheepishly. “I thought that if I told anyone else on Senator Mothma’s staff they’d stop me. Does General Kenobi know?”

“I thought that if I stopped to tell her that I was leaving the Temple she was going to drag me into a meeting on supply runs to the Outer Rim or the droid foundries on Ord Cestus or something else equally exciting,” Anakin said, then added helpfully, “I left a note to let her know I was doing a favor for a friend.”

“She’s going to love that,” Griaa said, with the weight of long familiarity.

He tapped one finger against the side of his head, and Ina-Rati, puzzlingly, caught the faintest mental undertone of relief from him, as if he was used to his own abilities being in doubt. It wasn’t what she would have expected from a Jedi, even an apprentice. “Well, she knows that I’m still alive, at least – which she didn’t five days ago. And she can comm me if she needs me.”

“What happened out there?” Griaa asked hesitantly. “The HoloNews and the Order both reported that General Kenobi had been killed on Jabiim, but you just mentioned Asajj Ventress –”

Anakin flinched at the words “Jabiim” and “Asajj Ventress”, although his hands didn’t waver on the speeder’s controls. “It’s classified,” he said. “I can’t – sorry, I just can’t.”

Ina-Rati hadn’t recognized the background pressure of his mind on hers until it abruptly vanished. She shot him a startled look, but he didn’t seem to realize that he had done anything that she might recognize.

Griaa murmured an apology. They fell silent as the speeder continued to descend. Ina-Rati stared out in fascination, her airsickness forgotten, at the passages that stretched out in all directions from the descent corridor, buildings that spanned multiple levels, swoop bikes and speeders passing by at the same restless pace that characterized the city on the surface. She glanced up, startled to realize that the entrance to the descent corridor was now little more than a rapidly fading bright circle the size of a coin. They were quite far down now.

By the time that they left the descent corridor and entered one of the passages, she couldn’t see the sky at all.

The realization unnerved her more than it should have. There were places deep in the bayous as dark as this was, where the branches of the turi trees tangled together and formed a canopy that might as well have been a roof, hiding all sunlight from the waters beneath. Beneath them lurked talat and eer, as well as haunts and eaters and all the other dangers of the swamps. Ina-Rati would much rather have been there than here.

She looked around curiously as they sped through the passage – which didn’t, to her surprise, resemble the tunnel that she had expected. Instead, it looked much like the surface that they had left, only in negative: a shadow-city filled with buildings that spanned multiple levels, pedestrian walkways, and numerous beings that darted from one pool of artificial light to another. Some of them glanced up as the speeder passed by overhead, to Ina-Rati’s discomfort. She saw Griaa shift in her seat, her hands tightly folded in her lap. The young Jedi seemed unconcerned by the attention.

Ina-Rati swallowed. “How far beneath the surface are we?” she asked.

Anakin glanced at the navscreen. “About half a klick,” he said. He tipped his head to one side, as if listening to a sound that no one else could hear. Ina-Rati stretched out with her own sixth sense, but she was too confused by the unfamiliar space to take advantage of her abilities. “If these coordinates are right –”

“They are,” Griaa said.

“– then we’re only about a klick from the warehouse CSF raided. They would have wanted to be as close to a descent corridor as they could, and the next nearest is about fifteen kilometers from here, not far from GAR HQ.”

“Have you been down here before?” Ina-Rati made herself ask.

His voice was absent. “Not since before the war began, and not often. There are Jedi whose specialty is Coruscant, but Obi-Wan and I usually operated offworld.” He glanced up.

Ina-Rati followed his gaze, catching sight of the walkways criss-crossing the air over their heads. Some of the pedestrians above them were watching the speeder as it passed. Ina-Rati sensed, very dimly, a kind of hunger and greed from them. She tightened her grip on her shockstaff with one hand and reached down with the other to undo the restraining strap on her thigh-holster.

“I should have picked a speeder with a canopy,” Anakin said, apparently having had the same thought. The faint pressure on Ina-Rati’s mind returned, which she found strangely reassuring. At least she knew that the Jedi was paying attention. “We’ll be okay.”

“If you say so,” Griaa said, and somehow managed to sound like she meant it.

Even though Ina-Rati kept looking up, suspecting that they were being followed by someone on the walkways, they reached the coordinates without incident. Anakin brought the speeder down in front of a dilapidated warehouse still strung with police tape and bent down, fiddling with something beneath the console after he had turned the engine off.

“I’d like to see someone try and steal it now,” he said, straightening up and grinning slightly. He vaulted out of the speeder, holding his hand out to help Griaa and Ina-Rati down. Once they were all standing on the duracrete pavement, he glanced down at Griaa. “Where to now?”

Griaa pulled her datapad out again and fiddled with it. “This way,” she said, pointing.

Ina-Rati glanced up again as their small party marched out in the direction indicated. She still had the sense that they were being followed, even if she couldn’t see their pursuer. Griaa was focused on her datapad, but Anakin’s gaze was constantly moving, flickering from building to building, up to the walkways and down again to the street in front of them. Ina-Rati could feel the edges of his perception stretched out in all directions, a strange sensation that she couldn’t describe in words.

Behind them, there was an electric zapping sound and a squawk of surprise. Ina-Rati spun around, her free hand on her blaster, only to see a cloaked figure scurrying away from their speeder, clutching its hand to its chest. She turned back to Anakin’s smug expression.

“He’s going to have to try harder than that if he really wants to steal it,” the Jedi apprentice grinned. “Come on, my lady.”

Ina-Rati fell into step with him, watching him out of the corner of her eye. She was a little reassured by his easy confidence, despite her mild discomfort at the way his power flared at the edges of her vision whenever her attention wavered. They walked past tall tenement buildings that soared upwards several levels, a speeder charging station, and a shop whose door was guarded by a grizzled-looking Nautolan woman. She watched them the entire length of the block, one greenish hand hidden beneath the fall of her jacket, and only slipped back inside once they had crossed the next street. Other residents of the neighborhood scurried past or stared at them with curiosity or suspicion, apparently fascinated by the unusual sight of a Jedi here in the Underworld.

Griaa was still looking down at her datapad. “According to the police report, Lieutenant De Raaha and two clone troopers went two blocks this way and turned down an alley. The tracking in the clones’ helmets is distorted because of the depth –”

Anakin nodded as if that meant something to him.

“– but it should be – here!” She stopped triumphantly in front of the entrance to a dingy alleyway. Shreds of police tape still cling to the walls on either side, but most of it had been ripped away, as if the residents of this part of Coruscant were unwilling to part with the use if the alley for more than a few hours.

Anakin fell back as Ina-Rati stepped forward, her breath catching in her throat. She felt sick, a little; she didn’t know if it was her sixth sense or just came from the knowledge that her sister had died here.

Behind her, she heard Anakin say softly, “Let me see that.”

Ina-Rati blinked, letting her second sight settle into place, like a film over her eyes. Her sister’s death should have left some kind of residue behind, something that she could see. Something that might tell her why Shara-Von had been down here, why she had been murdered.

Shadows moved before her eyes, none of them with enough features left for Ina-Rati to tell what species they were, let alone if they were male or female or if any of them was Shara-Von. They moved quickly and jerkily, flickering in and out like a damaged holovid. It was as if every event that had ever transpired in this alley was occurring at once. Ina-Rati squeezed her eyes shut, breathing in and out and trying to clear her head. Her hand crept to her bones, still hanging around her neck. She wished that she had a complete set.

She opened her eyes again, keeping her mind firmly on her second sight so as not to let it slip away. Doing that and extending her sixth sense while trying to concentrate only on Shara-Von was a little like rubbing her stomach and patting her head at the same time. Ina-Rati was conscious of the distant beginnings of a headache and knew that she would pay for overusing her powers this way later.

It shouldn’t have been so difficult to sense the residue of her sister’s spirit. Ina-Rati had had no problem finding the traces that Shara-Von had left behind in her flat, simply from daily use over the last year. Here where she had died, the remnant of her spirit should have been that much stronger, since death released powerful energies into the immediate area that often remained for years afterwards. Even if she hadn’t left behind a ghost, Ina-Rati still should have been able to sense _something_. Instead there was just a puzzling blankness. She was aware, very dimly, of all the other beings that died in this alley, but not of her sister’s death.

Frustrated, she blinked away her second sight and stepped forward, pacing down the course of the alley. With a kind of hazy amusement, she realized that the most of the holodramas she had seen had been wrong; there was no chalk outline on the ground where the body had laid. There were no visible traces of wrongdoing at all. She hoped that if she walked directly over the spot where her sister had died, then she might feel something with her sixth sense. A cold spot, or a hot one, or an unfamiliar smell or sound – it differed from person to person. This wasn’t the first time that Ina-Rati had walked over the scene of a murder, though it wasn’t one of her usual duties as a _lamarie_. Most _lamariex_ were sensitive to the spirits of those who had died by violence, especially those connected by blood. Ina-Rati ought to have been able to sense her sister’s spirit, but there was nothing.

Frustrated, she returned to the mouth of the alley, where Griaa and Anakin were waiting. The Jedi apprentice was still holding the datapad and was frowning up at the rooftops and walkways above them, his expression slightly distant. As Ina-Rati drew close, he glanced back down at her. “Anything?”

“Nothing,” she said, and was surprised to hear the choked off sob in her own voice. She hadn’t realized how certain she had been that coming here would give her some kind of answer. She was convinced that she had felt it during her meditation. Surely that hadn’t been a mistake.

Anakin hesitated, standing back on one foot. “May I?” he asked, and at her nod, went on, “According to the crime scene report, Shara-Von was found here, lying facedown.” He stepped past her, stopping about a third of the way down the alley, and turned back towards her. “She was facing the street. She had been shot three times, twice in the back and once in the neck. From the angle of the blasts, as far as I can tell from these pictures, and since she’s the same height as Obi-Wan – the shooter would either have had to be on hovering speeder or on one of those two walkways.” He indicated the walkways in question. “He or she was probably using a high-powered sniper rifle, since the report says that the blasts completed penetrated her body. Those are illegal on Coruscant, but that doesn’t keep criminals, private security, and bounty hunters from owning them anyway.”

Ina-Rati flinched at his matter-of-fact tone. He gave her a sympathetic look and came back to return the datapad to Griaa. Something on the ground apparently caught his eye, as he held out one hand. Ina-Rati felt his mind flex as the little plastic tube flew into his palm.

“What is that?” she asked, stepping close.

There was no cap. Anakin sniffed at it, then tipped it over onto his left index finger, spilling out a few grains of glittering powder. Ina-Rati and Griaa both winced as he licked them. “Glitterstim,” he said, spitting it out. “There must be spice dealers around here somewhere. I’m surprised that they’d be so close to the warehouse.”

Griaa studied the pavement, but didn’t say anything. Anakin tossed the vial aside and studied the alley again. “It’s weird,” he said. “I expected to sense something here. Violent death usually leaves –”

“Traces,” Ina-Rati finished.

He nodded. “You felt it – didn’t feel it, I guess – too? I can sense death here, lots of it, dating back centuries, but nothing recently. She’s Obi-Wan’s twin, so she must be Force-sensitive –”

“She wasn’t,” Ina-Rati said. “Shara-Von doesn’t have any – we call it Talent – at all. My mother once told me that the Jedi said that Shara-Von’s midi-chlorian count was the lowest that he had ever seen in a human, so much so that she has a natural resistance to being read.”

He looked startled. “Really? I didn’t know that. Maybe that’s why I can’t sense her death in the Force.”

Ina-Rati frowned. “Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “But she is my sister. I should be able to sense her spirit anyway. I’ve always been able to before unless she’s hiding herself on purpose.”

Griaa looked between them, apparently dubious at the supernatural content of this discussion. “According to CSF’s Organized Crime Unit, this neighborhood is disputed by Crimson Arrow and Emerald Star,” she offered. “It could have been either of them. Or could she have been killed somewhere else and brought here?”

“Not according to Lieutenant De Raaha’s report,” Anakin said. “He told me and Obi-Wan that –” He never finished the sentence. His left hand shot out, both Ina-Rati and Griaa shoved against the wall without being touched, and his lightsaber flashed in his gloved right hand, deflecting two blaster bolts into the wall across from him.

Griaa screamed, the sound apparently startled out of her, then clasped her hands over her mouth and looked embarrassed.

“Stay with me,” Anakin said, his voice surprisingly calm. He was standing in front of them, keeping the two women crowded back against the wall, now with both hands on the hilt of his lightsaber. “We’re going to go back to the speeder now, and then, I’m afraid, it’s going to be very unpleasant for you, Lady Ina-Rati.”

Ina-Rati shifted her grip on her shockstaff so that she was holding it both hands in a fighting pose, although she didn’t engage the neural stingers yet, and said, “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

Anakin’s gaze slid first right, then left. “Ah,” he said. “I see your point.”

Several dozen beings had gathered at either end of the walkway, most of them armed, either with blasters or with melee weapons of various types. Ina-Rati glanced quickly upwards, remembering the pedestrian walkways that crisscrossed the city, and saw that several more beings had taken up position above them, both on the walkways and on the roofs of the nearby buildings. One of them must have fired the blaster shots that Anakin had deflected.

With a small hiccupped sob, Griaa reached behind herself and drew a blaster from a holster at the small of her back. Although she looked like she was ready to burst into tears, her hands were steady and practiced on the weapon.

“Don’t do anything rash,” Anakin muttered to them. Louder, he said, “We’re not here to cause any trouble; we’re looking into the death of a woman who was killed here two days ago.” He paused, waiting for a response.

Ina-Rati reached out tentatively with her sixth sense, trying to gauge the mood of the strangers. With so many individuals present, she couldn’t pick out anything more specific than a strong sense of hostility, which frankly she didn’t need her sixth sense to tell her.

“Look,” Griaa whispered, “they’re wearing different colors. I think –”

Ina-Rati glanced quickly in either direction, seeing the red scarves and bandanas to her left and the green ones to her right.

“Oh, great,” Anakin said softly. “We _would_ walk into a gang war. Obi-Wan’s going to kill me.”

As far as Ina-Rati was concerned, it really wasn’t his master that he needed to be worrying about right now.

“We don’t want any trouble,” he said again, although he hefted his lightsaber slightly. The blade cast strange blue shadows across the battered duracrete pavement, hissing like a living thing as it split the air. Even without her second sight, Ina-Rati could see the light of his spirit flare outwards, momentarily blinding her before it settled back inside his skin. He shifted from foot to foot, wetting his lips. Energy crackled around him, raising the hair on the back of Ina-Rati’s neck, although Griaa didn’t seem to notice anything. “Just let us walk out of here.”

Somebody laughed, a high creaking thing that made Ina-Rati tighten her grip on her shockstaff, fingers hovering lightly over the controls. “Jedi!” he said. “Jedi here! And yum-yum!” He went off in another fit of crackling laughter that dissipated into a fit of coughing.

Griaa tensed at the insult, straightening her back and pushing her shoulders back.

“Whatever happens,” Anakin whispered to them, “do exactly what I say, okay? Stay with me.”

They both nodded. It should have been ridiculous, Ina-Rati thought, agreeing to obey a boy ten years her younger, but something about Anakin’s experienced calm reassured her, even without the knowledge that despite his youth, he had already fought in dozens of campaigns on the front.

He took a slow, sliding step back in the direction that they had come from, keeping his back to the wall. Ina-Rati shifted, meaning to follow him, and felt Griaa doing the same.

Something about the motion was apparently too much for the gangbangers, because a blaster shot rang out. Ina-Rati didn’t see what direction it had come from, but Anakin’s lightsaber flashed, deflecting it into the wall in front of them and leaving behind a charred spot in the duracrete. There was a rumble of dozens of voices all speaking at once, both crowds leaning forwards as though preparing to charge and crush the three strangers between them. Anakin had to raise his voice in order to be heard.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone!” he said. “I will if I have to. Just let us walk out of here –”

Ina-Rati glanced up in time to see the Night-Soarer crouching on one of the rooftops bring her blaster rifle up to her shoulder, aiming down at Anakin. She fired at the same time that Ina-Rati cried a warning.

Anakin deflected that bolt too, taking his left hand off his lightsaber hilt and grabbing at thin air. The blaster rifle flew out of the Night-Soarer’s hands, swooping down towards them, and Anakin cut it cleanly in three pieces, his lightsaber flashing. They clattered to the ground in front of him as he settled back into his ready position.

“Anyone else?” he demanded, his lips curling back ever so slightly from his teeth. “I can do this all day.”

“We don’t have all day,” Griaa whispered. “Nobody knows where we are!”

Ina-Rati elbowed her to make her stop talking, since the last thing she wanted was to let anyone else know that. Griaa fell silent, chewing her lip and gripping her blaster a little too tightly.

Up above them, the Night-Soarer’s wings flared as she leapt from the rooftop, landing in a crouch in the alley in front of them. Her claws scratched at the pavement, making Ina-Rati wince. Anakin tensed.

“That was my favorite blaster, Jedi boy,” the Night-Soarer snarled. She rose up to her full height, so that even Anakin had to tilt his head back to look at her. “You’re going to pay for that.”

“Take it up with the Jedi Temple,” Anakin snapped. “We’ve got solicitors on hold for that sort of thing.”

The Night-Soarer bared pointed teeth at him. She seemed cautious of the lightsaber, though, standing well back of its reach, which Ina-Rati probably should have found more reassuring than she actually did. “I’m going to rip your flesh from your bones and feed it to my hatchlings,” she spat. “I’ll burn your bones to tell fortunes and send the ashes back to your mother.”

Anakin actually hissed at the mention of his mother, though the sound was nearly lost amidst the hum of his lightsaber. “Get on with it, then. I’m going gray waiting for you to do anything besides talk.”

The Night-Soarer snarled, wordless. Her wings spread as she drew her arms back, mantling in a gesture of aggression, and the crest of spikes on her bald head rose upwards. Anakin’s lightsaber cast sinister blue shadows across her already deep blue skin, turning the red bandana tied around her head purple.

Someone from the opposite end of the alley growled, “ _I’m_ going to be the one to kill a Jedi today,” and Ina-Rati glanced quickly in that direction, her eyes widening slightly at the sight of the massive humanoid that stepped out from amidst the crowd, dwarfing the figures behind her. After a moment she identified the newcomer as a Mandallian Giant, which she had previously only seen in holovids: green-skinned and a little reptilian-looking, half again the height of a human, with a mouth full of razor sharp teeth. This one was female. She wasn’t carrying a weapon; she didn’t need to. Ina-Rati was fairly certain that she was capable of crushing a man’s head with one hand. There was a strip of dirty green fabric tied around her left bicep.

Ina-Rati gulped. She wasn’t even aware of depressing the controls on her shockstaff, except that suddenly the hum of Anakin’s lightsaber was joined by the familiar, comforting buzz of her neural stingers.

“Now, now, ladies,” Anakin said, a note of strain in his voice, “there’s enough of me to go around. No need to fight.”

The Mandallian Giant took one step forward. The Night-Soarer turned towards her, hissing, wings still spread beneath well-muscled blue arms that ended in hands tipped with sharp claws. “The Jedi is mine!”

Anakin took another slow, sidling step towards the mouth of the alley, taking one hand off the hilt of his lightsaber to draw Griaa and Ina-Rati along with him. The Night-Soarer caught sight of the movement and turned, a long pointed tongue protruding out from between her lips as she snarled. “Going somewhere, little Jedi? I thought you had all day.”

“Maybe another time, sweetheart.” Anakin took another step sideways, further away from the Mandallian Giant and the Night-Soarer, closer to the group of red-blazed beings. Ina-Rati wasn’t particularly happy about that, but it was preferable to their current position.

The Night-Soarer moved towards them, claws scraping across the pavement, and the Mandallian Giant took two massive steps forward and clapped her hands together on either side of the other woman’s head. Griaa screamed as it exploded, blood and brain matter spattering across the walls of the alley. Ina-Rati flinched as the Night-Soarer’s death energy stung at the edges of her sixth sense.

There were shouts of outrage from one side and encouragement from the other as the Night-Soarer’s body crumpled to the ground. Her friends surged forwards, blasters out and vibroblades raised. The Mandallian Giant clapped her bloody hands together and roared, “You scum, we’ll destroy every one of you until we get her back!” which stopped the Crimson Arrow gangers for an instant. “And then we’ll kill the Jedi!”

Anakin swore softly in Huttese and said quickly, “When I tell you to, run for the speeder and don’t look back. If I don’t make it, you fly back to the surface. Go to the Temple, get Obi-Wan. Don’t wait for me.”

“Anakin –”

“I said don’t wait!” He thrust out his free hand. The Mandallian Giant went flying backwards into the arms of her comrades, sending them sprawling like ninepins. He spun on his heel, another blast of energy shoving outwards into the opposite gang.

“Go!” Anakin said. He shoved Griaa and Ina-Rati in front of him and they ran, boots slapping against the ground.

Yelling incoherently, a Gamorrean blundered into their path, swinging an electroclub at them. Griaa jerked her blaster up and fired, a straight shot that took him directly between his piggish eyes. He tottered backwards, an expression of supreme surprise on his face before one of his friends shoved him aside.

Another burst of energy sent him flying over the heads of his comrades, knocking three others over as he fell. Griaa was frozen in shock, staring at the body of the Gamorrean that she had shot. Ina-Rati grabbed her hand and dragged her along, wielding her shockstaff one handed. Behind her she could hear the hum of Anakin’s lightsaber and the sound of blasterfire, drowning out the voices of the shouting combatants. She didn’t look back.

Ina-Rati had never left anyone behind in a fight before.

She and Griaa ran down the street, still holding hands. They had broken away, into the clear, and the street seemed to be empty. Any civilians in the area must have barricaded themselves inside their homes when the two gangs had begun to gather, if they hadn’t done so already at the sight of a Jedi apprentice striding confidently down the street as if he owned it.

For a few moments, Ina-Rati was filled with the horrible fear that the speeder wouldn’t be there anymore, but there it was, sitting by the curb in all its faded glory. Her relief lasted all of a heartbeat, beginning to dissipate when she remembered Anakin confidently booby-trapping it so that no one could steal it, and then disappeared entirely when she realized that the speeder was literally sitting there on the pavement, rather than levitated by its repulsors. The speeder’s bonnet was propped open, the power cells removed and tossed aside onto the pavement alongside what Ina-Rati recognized vaguely as pieces of the engine.

Ina-Rati and Griaa skidded to a stop, staring at it in horror.

The gangs hadn’t done that. It was too deliberate for them. That meant someone else –

Abruptly, Ina-Rati realized that the hum she was hearing wasn’t from Anakin’s lightsaber somewhere in the distance behind them, which in fact had ceased some time ago. She stared upwards as the airspeeder that had previously been hovering over the alley came swooping in above them. The barrel of a blaster rifle protruded from the side.

Ina-Rati shoved at Griaa. “Run!”

They ran.

Ina-Rati didn’t really know where they were, didn’t really know where they were going or if there was anywhere safe on this whole mad planet, but she ran anyway, until another speeder dropped out of the air in front of them. A female Weequay stood up in the passenger seat, resting her blaster rifle on the windshield.

Ina-Rati jinked left into the looming darkness of a nearby alley, still dragging Griaa with her. It was too narrow for the speeder to follow without turning sideways, which would foil the Weequay’s shot. They pelted down the alley, dodging around a rubbish bin, and into the next street over. The two airspeeders had followed them over the roofs of the surrounding buildings and now dropped down again, cutting off the street on either side of them. Griaa fired her blaster at the nearest, the transparisteel of the windshield spiderwebbing out from the impact point as the driver and the Weequay ducked out of the way.

Ina-Rati dragged her back towards the alley that they had just come from. She didn’t really have any real idea of what she was doing and distantly, she was aware that she was operating the way that she would have in the bayous, except that in the bayous she knew where to run and how to hide. In the bayous she could have drawn strength from the land to protect herself. On Coruscant her ability was limited to her second sight, which was of no use here.

A blaster shot rang out from behind them and Griaa went limp, starting to pull Ina-Rati down as she fell. Ina-Rati spun, releasing her as she planted her feet in a fighter’s stance and shifting to a two-handed grip on her shockstaff.

A shockstaff was no good against a blaster rifle. Ina-Rati took the shot squarely beneath her breastbone and fell backwards into blackness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised, [Ina-Rati's hair](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304051622152/).


	5. Chapter 5

_Chaos exploded around him like the heart of a star going into supernova, drowning out his comlink. He heard Alpha’s voice rise in an incomprehensible shout as the ARC trooper tackled him to the ground, shielding him with his armored body as the AT-AT collapsed on top of them. The Force shrieked with Master Sirrius’s death and the padawans’ panic._

_The last thing he knew before he blacked out was his apprentice screaming for him._

_He came to in response to a familiar, unwelcome presence in the Force. Alpha was still on top of him, but above him the great weight of the ruined AT-AT was being shifted, creaking dangerously amidst Jabiim’s constant downpour._

_“These clones are all dead,” said the mechanical voice of a droid. There was the sound of a metal foot hitting flesh. “So is this Jedi.”_

_“They are here somewhere.” This speaker was female, her voice deep for a woman but filled with the familiar richness of the Force. “I can feel it.”_

_He heard footsteps approach, metal ringing on the shattered remnants of the AT-AT. “This clone is still alive,” said a droid._

_Alpha’s limp body was lifted off him, immediately replaced by the rain that spilled down across his cheeks. He scrabbled weakly for his lightsaber until he felt it slide off his belt and away from him._

_“This Jedi is also alive,” said the droid, in the same neutral tones with which it had announced Master Sirrius’s death. Its narrow face appeared in his field of vision as it peered down at him. “The clone’s armor must have absorbed the blast.”_

_“Cuff them both and bring them with us. This one is high in Republic command and very valuable to the Count.”_

_“Anakin,” he heard himself gasp, trying to twist away as cold metal fingers snapped shock-cuffs around his wrists. It wasn’t his voice, but it was just as familiar as his own – feminine, tight with pain, the vowels roughened the way they did under stress._

_“Don’t worry, Kenobi. If your Padawan isn’t dead yet, he will be soon,” said Asajj Ventress, leaning over him. “Just like you.”_

“Obi-Wan,” Anakin mumbled, even before he had properly returned to consciousness again. Automatically he reached out for her, feeling his mind touch lightly against hers, far off and distracted on the surface of the planet. She was alive. Preoccupied and a little bored by her current circumstances, but unmistakably alive. Anakin felt something inside himself twist free in relief at the discovery.

Only after he had ascertained that Obi-Wan was safe did Anakin take any notice of his own surroundings.

The ferrocrete floor he was sitting on was painfully hard beneath his thighs and buttocks, but that was nothing compared to his arms, which had been pulled up over his head and shock-cuffed to a metal ring in the wall behind him. From the ache in his shoulders, he’d been sitting like this for some time; his internal chrono told him that it had only been a few hours. The binders cut painfully into his left wrist and the place where the stump of his right arm joined his prosthetic, which he barely even thought about anymore, throbbed in time with the beat of his heart. If he looked up, he could see the dull gleam of his durasteel hand.

It was too bad that he couldn’t remove and reattach it at will, he thought. If he could get just one hand out of the binders, he would be able use the Force to release the other one, but he needed both a visual fix and a manual focus. Some Jedi could use the Force to free themselves from a set of binders, but Anakin had never mastered that trick, which was really a pity, considering how many times he’d gotten tied up in his career as a Jedi.

The pain in his arms and shoulders blended in with the pounding in his head and the fallout from the beating he’d received. He felt liked he’d been stepped on by a Mandallian Giant – oh, wait, _he had_ , though he had managed to roll aside before catching the worst of it. Being squished was a death too embarrassing to even consider, though the mental image of Obi-Wan having to deliver that news to his mother amused him for a moment. His mother probably wouldn’t find it funny, though. Obi-Wan wouldn’t either.

Anakin actually groaned out loud for reasons that had nothing to do with the throbbing in his head or the blood he could feel dried on his face.

Obi-Wan was going to kill him when she found out what he had gotten himself into because he had hesitated a beat too long on what should have been a killing stroke. He could remember it now, with a clarity that made him wince. For an instant, trapped in that alley between Emerald Star and Crimson Arrow, he had been back in that abandoned base on Aargonar. Left behind. Forgotten. Hovering on the edge between the madness and the Dark Side. That had only been a few weeks ago, though it seemed a lifetime gone now. Anakin still didn’t know which way he had slipped when he had ignited his lightsaber. He hadn’t hesitated then, and he had nearly killed a fellow Jedi because of it. This time he had hesitated and come perilously near to getting himself killed as a result.

Well, he thought, looking up at the shock-cuffs, which clicked gently against his prosthetic, there was still plenty of time to get killed today. It wasn’t even midnight yet.

“Anakin!” he heard Griaa call softly. “Anakin Skywalker!”

He looked away from the shock-cuffs and across at Griaa, who was crouching on the other side of a double layer of ray shields. Ina-Rati Kenobi was with her, and a scarlet-skinned Zeltron woman that Anakin didn’t recognize. None of them were in shock-cuffs; apparently Anakin was the only one of them considered to be dangerous.

He licked his lips, tasting dried blood, and said, “Are you all right?”

“We’re not hurt, just stunned,” Griaa said. “Are you all right? You look awful?”

“This?” Anakin scoffed, gripping the metal ring with both hands and pulling himself up into a more comfortable position. His legs protested the movement as he folded them tailor-style, but he felt better for having done so. “This is nothing. I’ve had worse.”

“Is that supposed to be encouraging?” inquired the Zeltron in the raw accent of a native Coruscanti. She had a gold ring in her snub nose and dyed-green hair bound back from her face in half a dozen tight braids. “You’re chained up in a cage like a tame anooba.”

“Not the first time,” Anakin said, which was, sadly, true. “And you are?”

She stared at him, her expression challenging even through the ray shields separating them. “You can call me Felisha,” she said finally.

“Hi, Felisha,” Anakin said politely. “I’m Anakin Skywalker. I’m from the Jedi Order. I’ll get us out of this.”

“Sure,” she said dubiously. “Any bright ideas?”

Obi-Wan was going to _love_ her, Anakin thought. “Genius takes time,” he said, and saw her roll her eyes.

Ina-Rati was sitting with her back against the wall, her knees pulled up to her chest and her head resting against one hand. She looked at Anakin as if he had personally disappointed her, which, he supposed, was fair enough. He’d seen that look directed at him before; Obi-Wan had perfected it. It was startling to see the same expression on Ina-Rati’s half-familiar features.

“Do you know where we are?” Anakin asked, looking away from Ina-Rati.

Felisha sighed. She settled herself into a more comfortable seated position, resting her hands in her lap. “We’re in one of Hrado Jun Gatan’s clearinghouses,” she said. “I don’t know which one; he’s got more than a dozen, but only two that handle sentients that I know of. One’s on Level 786, but I haven’t been able to find out where the other one is.”

_Handle sentients_. Anakin felt his blood chill to ice at the words. He couldn’t sense any surprise from Ina-Rati or Griaa, which meant that Felisha must have already told them this. “This Hrado’s running slaves on Coruscant?” he said, struggling to keep his voice under control.

Felisha’s mouth – her lipstick was the same shade of emerald green as her hair, though a little smeared – twisted in distaste. “Yes. Sick kriffing barve,” she added.

Anakin almost asked if CSF knew, then stopped himself. He knew better. Anyone in CSF who knew was almost certainly being handsomely paid off. On grossly over-populated worlds like Coruscant, the slave trade could flourish simply because of the sheer number of people arriving and departing the planet every day. Hundreds, even thousands, of individuals could vanish without anyone ever noticing as long as they were the right – or rather, the wrong – sort of people. High-risk victims, as they were called in the criminology classes Anakin had taken at the Temple. People that were easy to snatch off a street and whom no one would miss.

Many of the slaves he had known back on Tatooine had similar origins. Anakin was in the minority of individuals born into slavery.

He licked his lips again, making himself ask, “Crimson Arrow?” while trying to keep a Jedi’s serene neutrality in his voice. It was harder than he thought it should have been.

“Yes.” Felisha watched him for a moment, her gaze thoughtful, then she said abruptly, “Vape it. I run Emerald Star. Or at least I did until this morning, when Jun Gatan’s thugs grabbed me and my guards in front of my son’s school.”

Anakin felt his belly clench. “Your son –”

“Safe. He was in the building already, and I’ve got guards in it.” She bared her teeth in a snarl. “One of my guys got away. He’ll have told my husband and wife, and my people will be out on the street in force going every after every red shirt they see.”

“You don’t say,” Ina-Rati said, speaking up for the first time. She rubbed at her face, looking tired. “If we hadn’t gotten caught in a gang war, then we wouldn’t be in here.”

Felisha gave her a cool look. “I’d blame the barve who locked us up, not the woman in the cell with you.”

Ina-Rati didn’t say anything, just dropped her head back against her palm and looked away.

More for the sake of doing something with his hands, rather than actually hoping to accomplish anything, Anakin fumbled with the shock-cuffs and the ring for a few minutes. He should have been able to do this, he thought bitterly; he was strong enough that he should have been able to pour the Force into the cuffs and break the durasteel apart like fine china. He’d done it with droidekas before. He should have been able to do it with these cuffs, which were infinite degrees less complicated than battle droids were.

That was probably the problem, Anakin thought wearily. He could dig his way through a starfighter’s guts or a protocol droid’s circuitry without a problem, but he still got tripped up on anything simpler than a comm unit.

Every time he moved, he felt memory spark lazily in his limbs, as though his body remembered being chained for a much longer period of time than Anakin had ever experienced. He might not have recognized where it came from if it hadn’t been for the vision he had had just before he returned to full consciousness.

Not his memory. Obi-Wan’s.

She hadn’t spoken to him of what had happened to her on Rattatak, where Asajj Ventress had held her prisoner for nearly a month. Anakin knew that she had been shackled, knew that she had been tortured, but that was because he had seen her scars – once, fleetingly, by accident before Obi-Wan had hastily covered them. Alpha had worn his like a badge of honor. Obi-Wan hid hers as though she was ashamed of them, though _shame_ wasn’t the emotion Anakin sensed from her. He’d felt flashes of her memories in the Force, and that had been bad enough because flashes were all they were – fleeting impressions of pain and fear, a steely determination so strong it took his breath away, and grief driven so deep that Anakin had woken weeping. He still didn’t know the cause.

Even at the best of times, Anakin wasn’t much good at traditional meditation, and this was hardly that. Still, it wasn’t as though he had anything better to do.

He shut his eyes, letting his breathing relax into one of the dozens of patterns most Jedi younglings were taught even before they could speak. He caught at the memory of those last moments in his vision: Obi-Wan’s raw terror, the rain on her cheeks, the weight of Alpha in full armor, the smell of blood and spent thermite, the cold mechanical tones of the battle droids, the restless darkness of Asajj Ventress in the Force. Through all that Anakin wove the strength of their bond, erratic as it was; through that bond Master and Padawan had become one, complementary halves of the same Jedi Knight. _Hers mine ours._

The Force would show him what had been done to Obi-Wan because it believed that he and she were one and the same.

Anakin didn’t realize the flaw in this logic until he had already slipped into the vision.

_The ion-charged sandstorm had been raging for hours. Even within the thick walls of the abandoned Republic base, Anakin could hear it howling like a living creature attempting to claw its way inside. There was already a heavy drift of sand covering the floor of the building, blown in through the massive cracks in the walls and the broken windows, all caused by the CIS attack that had forced the Republic troops to pull back. The sand was stained with blood, discarded gear, droid parts, and pieces of clone trooper armor littered across it._

_With the gunship bomber’s door blown off, maybe in the attack, Anakin had rigged a blanket across the opening to protect the bomber’s delicate electronics from the sandstorm. The emergency lights in the hangar still glowed dimly, but weren’t visible from inside the ship. Anakin was working in the thin artificial light of a glowrod recovered from the emergency kit of a nearby gunship that had been damaged beyond repair._

_Sweat dripped down his face, stinging his sand-abraded skin. He had to stop frequently to shake out his left hand, which had begun cramping up an hour ago. His damp hair and tunics stuck to his skin; he had sand down the neck of his shirt and inside the legs of his boots. Aargonar was like Tatooine, a desert planet on the fringes of the Outer Rim with no real value beyond its location. Anakin felt like he was back on Tatooine, nine years old and trapped in the shop during a sandstorm, working on Watto’s commissions until his head throbbed and his hands cramped. It was as though the past eleven years had been nothing more than a dream and now he had woken up and found that he had never escaped Tatooine at all – still in Mos Espa, still a slave. As though he had never met a Jedi Master named Qui-Gon Jinn or a Naboo queen called Padmé Amidala, or a Jedi Knight who had made Anakin her entire galaxy and died for it._

_For the fourth time in the past hour, the off-sized flange retainer slipped from his cramped left hand and clattered to the floor. Anakin swore, kicking the side of the bomber. “Stupid flange retainer!” he spat, reaching down to pick up the fallen retainer. “Why can’t I make this work?”_

_He couldn’t fix the bomber. He hadn’t been able to save Bhat Jul, the padawan who had died in his arms a few hours earlier. He hadn’t been able to save Lani Whitesun, the boy who had been tortured to death by the Tusken Raiders who had attacked the settlements on Tatooine. Geonosis, Ohma’dun, Jabiim, New Holstice – so many planets where Jedi had died and Anakin couldn’t do anything to help them. Aargonar was just one more._

_Anakin had cut Lani down from the framework he had been tied to and held him as he died. If it hadn’t been for the children that had been kidnapped along with the other boy, Anakin didn’t know what he would have done._

_If it had been his mother, like he had seen in his visions, then he would have killed every Sand Person in the village._

_So many people dead. So many people Anakin had killed._

_So many people Anakin had wanted to kill._

_He spun at a sound from outside the bomber, his lightsaber leaping into his hand as he thrust back the makeshift curtain. A half dozen Yuzzem, the huge furry ursinoids that the Seppies were using as ground troops on Aargonar, had approached the bomber and were blocking the exit._

_“What’s the matter, Jedi?” demanded one Yuzzem, grinning at him through a mouthful of sharp teeth. Two-inch long canines protruded from his lower lip, making him lisp slightly. “Get left behind?”_

_Where in blazes was Hett? Anakin hadn’t thought of him since the other Jedi had left him to search the base for survivors and manufacture a makeshift weapon. Anakin couldn’t sense him._

_Hett must have left him. Struck out on his own, into his precious desert; Anakin should have known better than to trust a Tusken, Jedi Master or not. He’d been left behind again, like Qui-Gon had left him, like Padmé had, like Obi-Wan and all the other Jedi who had died on Jabiim –_

_“You don’t_ talk _to Jedi!” said another Yuzzem. “You just kill them!”_

_Red flushed across his vision, like a film of blood in the Force. Anakin pulled his lips back from his teeth in a snarl. “Yes! Kill them!” he spat as he rushed forward, his lightsaber upraised. The Yuzzem blurred into the Sand People he had been forced to leave alive on Tatooine, into the Nimbus troops who had murdered Obi-Wan, into the droids on Geonosis marching unhesitatingly into the arena. “Stinking animals!”_

_His blade burned through flesh and bone, sheared through metal, and the Force ran red, dark pleasure running across his tongue and down his throat. He killed indiscriminately, screaming curses like a madman, feeling the deaths in the Force. Obi-Wan would have – Obi-Wan would –_

_Obi-Wan was dead too._

_His mother, Padmé, all his friends, all the Jedi. They were all dead. Some of them just hadn’t had the courtesy to lie down yet._

_Anakin wasn’t even aware of dropping his lightsaber, because the next thing he knew he was on his knees in the sand while A’Sharad Hett stood over him and said words that made no sense to Anakin’s ears._

_His jaw ached. Someone had struck him. Knocked his lightsaber from his hand. He should have died – no. It had been Hett._

_Anakin had not, in the end, been able to see Hett as a fellow Jedi instead of a Tusken._

_“You should have killed me,” he said into a break in Hett’s words. His anger and bloodlust had been washed away into the Force, only a dull memory that ached like a sore tooth, and all Anakin felt was a profound weariness. Obi-Wan was dead, he had turned Padmé away, and the war was pointless. He’d heard the Masters on Aargonar talking:_ we can’t absorb another loss like Jabiim. _None of them had even been on Jabiim. Only Anakin. All the others were dead. What could the Masters know of Jabiim, of loss? “Why didn’t you kill me?”_

_“Because you and I are still Jedi, Anakin Skywalker,” Hett said. “And death is not our way.”_

_Anakin looked up at him, at the mask that hid his face. He lifted one hand, catching his lightsaber as it rose out of the sand and returned to him. He stared down at the weapon._

_They’d never found Obi-Wan’s lightsaber either, though Aubrie had retrieved Master Sirrius’s, which had been thrown wide in the explosion._

_“Yes, it is,” he said. “Jedi, Tusken, it’s all the same. We both kill. Death is our gift. At least your people are honest about it.”_

_Hett sighed. “My people are the Jedi,” he said. “A fact which you seem unable to come to terms with, Skywalker. If we are to survive, if we are to be of assistance to our fellow Jedi, we must work together. I don’t think that it’s possible so long as you see me as a Tusken instead of a Jedi.”_

_He was right, but all Anakin felt was exhaustion._ I don’t care, _he thought,_ I don’t care –

_Hett was still talking, but he was reaching for his mask as he did so. Anakin looked up, meaning to tell him that it didn’t matter, that nothing mattered, but the exclamation was startled out of him anyway. “You – you’re not –”_

_Beneath his mask, A’Sharad Hett was as human as Anakin._

_And Anakin Skywalker was ashamed to realize that it mattered._

Gasping, Anakin dragged himself out of the vision. He was trembling from the effort it had taken, realizing belatedly just how easy it would have been to lose himself in the memory – not Obi-Wan’s, like he had planned, but his own.

Anakin hadn’t wanted to think about Aargonar ever again.

He slumped back against the wall, the binders dragging at his wrists. _I hope Obi-Wan didn’t catch that_ , he thought wearily, but he had a bad feeling about it. Roads went both ways, and he was the one who had opened the gates.

In the cell opposite him, Felisha had retreated to the back, while Griaa was sitting next to Ina-Rati and trying to talk to her. Ina-Rati didn’t look pleased by the effort; Anakin could sense frustration at her helplessness coming off her in waves.

“I’m going to get us out of this,” he said.

Felisha and Ina-Rati gave him almost identical disgusted looks. Griaa forced a smile. “I know you are,” she said.

Before Anakin was forced to find a response to that, he heard a nearby door slide open. Chained to the wall, he couldn’t see where it was, but Felisha shot to her feet, Ina-Rati following a little more slowly. Both women moved with the grace of trained fighters, which Anakin might have admired more under other circumstances.

Metal clicked on the ferrocrete, and a moment later a slim humanoid figure in rust-colored armor appeared in front of him, her face concealed by a T-slit helmet. Incongruously she was carrying a mesh shopping bag. Her head moved towards him, then she turned towards the opposite cell.

“Stand against the back wall,” she ordered, her voice distorted by the helmet and without any notable accent.

“Why?” Felisha demanded.

The stranger tapped a finger against the butt of her holstered blaster. “Because I said so, Emerald.”

Felisha stared at her, then Ina-Rati caught her wrist in one hand and pulled her back away from the ray shield, muttering something in her ear. Griaa followed meekly.

“Smart lady,” said the stranger. She keyed a code into the keypad next to the ray shield, which opened a space about the size of a shoebox near the bottom of the shield. The woman rolled three plastic bottles of water through it before keying it closed again.

“Thank you,” Griaa said, her voice pitched high with nerves. She stepped forward to retrieve the bottles, holding them against her chest. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“That’s above my pay grade.” She still had one bottle left in the mesh bag and before Griaa could say anything else, turned towards Anakin.

He rattled the binders against the metal ring, raising his eyebrows.

It was hard to tell with the helmet, but Anakin thought that she was looking between him and the keypad. At last she said, “No funny business. No Jedi tricks. You don’t move and I don’t shoot you. I don’t have the code for your shock-cuffs.”

“Fair enough,” Anakin agreed. “On my honor as a Jedi.”

“Jedi don’t have honor.”

He shrugged and repeated, “Fair enough.”

It was a common misconception that the concept of honor meant anything to Jedi, one much perpetuated by holodramas of varying quality, but even the reasonably good ones tended to get this one wrong. Jedi owed allegiance to only four things: the Force, the Code, the Order, and the Republic, and the last two were debatable under the right circumstances. Honor didn’t come into it.

Watching him warily, the woman punched in the keycode for his cell. As the ray shield sizzled out of existence, Anakin realized with a start what he should have noticed much earlier: he couldn’t feel the stranger in the Force. He straightened his back, watching her as she took the last water bottle in one hand, setting the mesh bag aside, and drew her blaster with the other. Aside from a bare handful of species that had developed the ability to hide in the Force as a defensive skill, he only knew of two ways a non-Jedi could do so: by being incredibly strong or incredibly weak in the Force. There was a particular Force trick that allowed Jedi to do something similar, but Anakin was certain that he would have noticed if she was a Jedi, even one of Master Tholme’s undercover operatives.

She put the barrel of her blaster against the side of his head before she popped the cap on the water bottle and held it to his lips, tilting it up so that Anakin could drink.

When he had drunk a third of the bottle she pulled it away from him, tipping it upright again. Anakin took a moment to get his breath, and was utterly surprised when she leaned in and said quickly against his ear, “Is your partner here?”

He froze.

When he didn’t answer, she repeated the question, and this time he said, “If I’m not back at the Temple by about an hour from now – if I’ve got the time right – she knows where to start looking.”

That wasn’t completely a lie, since the speeder he’d checked out from the Temple pool was equipped with tracers. If it hadn’t already been dismantled into its component parts and shipped off to a dozen different chop shops in the Underworld, Obi-Wan could follow the trackers to the street where Anakin had left it.

“So that’s a no,” said the woman. She put the bottle to his lips again, cutting off his ability to respond.

Anakin drank some more, then turned his face sideways to make her remove the bottle. He got water splashed down the front of his tunic, but considering what else was on it, the addition of water could only help.

She capped the water bottle one-handed, but didn’t move the blaster from its resting place just behind his right ear. Anakin was only mildly reassured by the fact that it was set to stun and not kill.

He said, “Why can’t I feel you in the Force?”

“The Jedi Master who took my sister away told my parents that I had the lowest midi-chlorian count he’d ever seen in a sentient being,” she said, her voice pitched not to carry into the other cell. “It has its advantages.”

Anakin felt his spine straighten. “Your sister’s a Jedi? Then why –”

“Yeine, what the blazes do you think you’re doing?”

The armored women shifted unhurriedly, her grip on her blaster never loosening for a moment. Anakin looked up in the direction that the shout had come from, raising his eyebrows when he saw the group of extremely well-armed beings standing in the corridor just outside the cell. The one who had spoken was a Weequay woman standing with her hands on her hips, her eyes narrowed in her wrinkled face as she scowled at them.

Yeine lifted the half-empty water bottle. “I had it under control.”

“The hell you do.” The Weequay made a gesture with one hand, and all six of the beings behind her raised their blaster rifles, staring down the barrels at Anakin. “Step away from the Jedi, Yeine – slowly. You have no idea how dangerous these creatures are. He took out a dozen of Hrado’s men before we brought him down.”

Anakin smiled.

Yeine – if that was her name – dropped the water bottle and shifted to a two-handed grip on her blaster as she backed away from Anakin. As soon as she was within reach the Weequay grabbed her and thrust her aside. “Idiot! Get out of here before you do something else stupid.”

Without a look back, Yeine holstered her blaster and left, her armored boots clicking on the ferrocrete floor. Anakin heard the door slide open and shut, and then she was gone.

The Weequay gestured again, and her companions fanned out around the walls of the cell, their blasters still aimed at Anakin. Only after they had taken their positions did she enter the cell, pulling a set of binders from her belt. “If you try anything, Jedi, there won’t be enough of you left to identify.”

“I’m at your disposal,” Anakin said, tipping his chin up.

She didn’t hesitate as she approached him, leaning over to fasten the binders around his wrists below the original set, then released the first set. Apparently they weren’t going to risk him having his hands free even for an instant. As soon as they settled into place she stepped back and drew her blaster, pointing it at him.

With his hands cuffed, Anakin had to use the wall to push himself to his feet, then nearly collapsed as his abused legs nearly gave out beneath him. He pressed his hands against his thigh and shoved the Force through his bad leg, a rapid healing of muscle and bones and tendons that took his breath away and weren’t any substitute for bacta or a night in the Halls of Healing.

He must not have been moving fast enough for the Weequay, since one of her goons – a pale blue Wroonian male – grabbed Anakin by his shoulder and hauled him the rest of the way upright. He stepped quickly away as Anakin swayed on his feet, as though worried that he might have been contaminated by the contact.

“Can you walk?” the Weequay demanded. From her expression, if the answer was “no”, then Anakin fully expected her to order him dragged wherever they were going.

“Slowly,” he said. “Your friends kicked the poodoo out of me.”

She gave him an extremely nasty look. “Then walk. And don’t try any of your Jedi tricks.”

Anakin raised his hands. “Why would I? You have me at a disadvantage.”

She snorted. The Wroonian shoved at him with the barrel of his blaster rifle and Anakin took a slow, limping step forward, testing out his leg. The goons fell in around him in a pattern familiar to him from the dozen or so Seppie prisoners he’d escorted into Republic custody, and Anakin fought a smile. He didn’t think his amusement would be appreciated.

Griaa’s voice was so high-pitched it was practically a squeak. “Where are you taking him?”

“None of your business, little Twi’lek,” said the Weequay. “It’ll be your turn soon enough.”

Anakin turned to wink at her. “Don’t worry, Griaa. I told you that I’d get us out of this and I will.”

One of the goons cuffed him. “Shut up, Jedi!”

Anakin raised his hands to rub at the place where he’d been struck. “Just for that,” he said, “I’ll kill you first.”

Scowling, the goon – he was a Farghul – raised his paw to hit him again, but the Weequay knocked it away. “Stop that! Hrado needs him in one piece.”

Anakin wasn’t sure whether to be encouraged by this or not, but “in one piece” was definitely preferable to the alternative. He smiled at Griaa and Ina-Rati again. All he could sense from Ina-Rati was incredulity, but Griaa seemed encouraged. Anakin hoped that her trust in him wasn’t misplaced.

He was marched through a pair of sliding double doors and down a long corridor lined with more cells. Like the two that he had just left, separated from the others for some reason, these were ray-shielded, but each was filled with five or six individuals. Some of them looked up as he passed, murmuring to each other when they recognized his Jedi robes. Anakin felt his jaw tighten with anger, the Force vibrating with his tension. He had to remind himself that he was injured – if not as badly as his mostly-affected limp made it seem – shackled, and unarmed; the most that he would succeed in was getting himself killed.

By the time they reached the turbolift at the opposite end of the corridor, Anakin’s jaw was clenched so tightly that it hurt, but his training held and he not only knew exactly how many people were being held prisoner on this floor, but that there were two lifts and another sliding door that probably led to a stairwell. Since there were no purpose-built prisons on Coruscant, especially down here, Anakin suspected that they were in a converted tenement building.

The Weequay woman pressed the button for the turbolift. The doors opened creakily and Anakin was hustled inside, still surrounded by guards. Between the eight of them it made for a cramped fit, which Anakin might have been able to do something with if he didn’t have Obi-Wan’s voice whispering in his head – metaphorically, thankfully, at least for the moment – that he ought to find out what was going on here. Besides that, his head hurt, his arms and shoulders ached, his leg was killing him, and his ribs felt like they were on fire. Anakin channeled the Force into them as best he could, wishing that he was better at healing. Like he had told Ina-Rati on the Peregrine, he wasn’t any good except as a field medic; sustained healing of any sort was beyond him.

The turbolift rose steadily. Anakin felt memory tickle the back of his mind, triggered by the shock-cuffs on his wrists and the guards surrounding him. His vision blurred, then cleared again. Anakin found himself in a different turbolift, surrounded by different guards, but this time his line of sight was lower. He glanced down at his cuffed wrists, unsurprised to see that he was looking at a woman’s long, elegant hands, much familiar and much loved, now dark with dirt and dried blood. Showers of sparks from hundreds of lightsaber duels had left faint scars across her knuckles.

Obi-Wan’s hands.

Anakin blinked, and the borrowed memory resolved itself into reality as the turbolift doors slid open, though for an instant Obi-Wan’s weariness and despair dragged at him before sliding away after the vision. There were no cells on this floor; all the internal walls had been torn out to create one huge open room, which was empty except for the desk at the far end and the full-size holoprojector on the floor in front of it. Anakin froze when he recognized the hologram, but he was propelled forward by the guards and was given no choice except to move or fall flat on his face.

“Any trouble?” asked the man standing in front of the holoprojector, turning to frown at them. He was a human male, with a black beard pulled into two braids and his bald head marked by tattoos.

“None,” said the Weequay. “So much for the mighty Jedi.”

“I’m very fond of my good looks,” Anakin said, since a response of some kind was obviously expected. “I’d hate to mess them up by getting shot in the face.”

For this trouble the Farghul who had hit him earlier grabbed his shoulder and kicked at the backs of his knees, knocking Anakin off-balance. He fell heavily in front of the holoprojector, barely catching himself with his cuffed hands before his forehead impacted with the floor. At least it was carpeted.

_“Young Skywalker,”_ said a voice that made him wince. _“What an unexpected development this is.”_

Anakin pushed himself up to his knees as the guards backed off, their weapons leveled at him again, raising his hands to try and wipe the dried blood off his face. “Count Dooku,” he said. “I could say the same for you.”

The lifesize hologram of the count looked down at him with disdain. _“What interesting stories I’ve heard about you recently,”_ he said.

“I’m an interesting guy,” Anakin said. “How’s Asajj Ventress? Obi-Wan says hi.”

_“Insolent as ever, I see. How Master Kenobi puts up with you without ripping your tongue out is a constant mystery to me.”_

“Believe me, Count, some days I ask myself that same question,” Anakin said. He rested his palms on his thighs, letting his breathing even out as he stared defiantly at Dooku’s hologram. “But that’s not really the sort of thing Jedi do. That’s more your department, isn’t it?”

_“You would drive even a Jedi Master to torture and murder, Skywalker.”_ He turned to the man standing beside the holoprojector, whom Anakin assumed must be Hrado Jun Gatan. _“I am familiar with this Jedi. I’m convinced of his authenticity. I will give you five hundred thousand credits for him.”_

“Three million,” said Hrado, a number which made Anakin hiss through his teeth in surprise. “I know what a Jedi Knight is worth. Five hundred grand will barely cover his lightsaber.” He held it up for emphasis. “And this one killed some of my crew. The others want vengeance.”

Dooku fixed him with a cold gaze, making Hrado take a step back. _“He is not a Jedi Knight, merely an apprentice. Six hundred thousand.”_

Anakin shut his eyes as they bargained, reaching out with the Force. The presence of his lightsaber, even in someone else’s hands, was reassuring; he could sense his utility belt lying on the desk behind Dooku’s hologram, which meant that his comlink and the emergency gear he was accustomed to carrying into the field were probably there too. Urgency gnawed at him; the Council had to know that someone on Coruscant was treating with the leader of the Confederacy. All he needed was a distraction; a handful of gangsters couldn’t compete with a combat-hardened Jedi apprentice.

“You know that I don’t know anything about Republic strategy,” Anakin said without looking up. “I’m just a Padawan. All they tell me is where to go and who to fight. The only reason that I’m here right now is because I ran out on going to meetings with Obi-Wan.”

_“Somehow this is not a revelation to me,”_ Dooku said. _“Your strategic value is negligible, Skywalker. If you think that you are anything other than bait to me, then you are greatly mistaken.”_

Anakin opened his eyes, an unvoiced retort on the tip of his tongue. The thing was that Dooku was right. Anakin had crossed half a galaxy for Obi-Wan; he would have charged Ventress’s fortress on Rattatak alone if he had had to. Obi-Wan would do no less for him. From the slight smile on Dooku’s face, he knew that too.

_“I am not unfamiliar with the ties that bind Master and Padawan,”_ the Sith Lord said softly.

Anakin dropped his gaze again, bracing his hands against the thighs.

He felt Dooku’s attention leave him as he turned back towards Hrado. _“Seven hundred and fifty thousand,”_ he said, _“and I will add a loan of three dreadnoughts and their crews for the duration of your sister’s campaign.”_

“Done,” Hrado said immediately. “I’ll throw in the kid’s lightsaber for free.”

Anakin let his breath whistle out through his teeth, his mind torn between despair – he was too young to remember being sold for the first time, but he had been to the slave markets on Tatooine – and furious thought. Seven hundred and fifty grand was high for a Padawan, but about average for a Knight, which Anakin remembered from the notes on the Crimson Nova affair. That was bounties, not ransoms, but it came down to about the same thing. The money wasn’t a surprise, but the mention of the starships was. Three dreadnoughts and their crews were easily worth fifty million credits, maybe more. No Jedi, not even Yoda, was worth that. Anakin certainly wasn’t; he wasn’t even a Knight yet. And what campaign, anyway? He couldn’t mean Coruscant –

“What about transport?” Hrado asked, tapping Anakin’s lightsaber against the palm of his hand. “My next shipment isn’t due for another few days, and Planetary Defense is all het up because Aerli can’t keep her birds in check –”

The Force murmured a warning at the back of Anakin’s mind. He shifted slightly, gathering his legs under himself.

_“I have arrangements in place to transport Skywalker offworld immediately,”_ Dooku said, which was news to Anakin. _“That information will be transmitted separately. I suggest –”_

Without warning, every light in the room blinked out, leaving them in darkness broken only by the flickering blue light of the hologram.

Anakin rocketed to his feet and threw himself into a backflip, his cuffed hands flaring out to catch his lightsaber as it slid out from between Hrado’s fingers and smacked into his palms. He ignited it through the chain on his shock-cuffs as he landed on the balls of his feet, blade flaring out around him in a streak of blue light.

The guards had begun firing even before he landed. Anakin deflected the bolts back at the shooters, his blade moving so quickly it was nothing but a blue blur. He slammed a kick into the muzzle of the nearest Fargul, slicing through the barrel of his blaster. Grabbing for the Force, he threw the nearest guard into the wall and flicked his blade out sideways, deflecting the stun bolt into the last remaining guard, who slowly keeled over backwards, his blaster falling from his hand. Anakin was left standing at the center of a circle of unconscious beings.

It hadn’t taken more than six or seven seconds.

Anakin stood still with the tip of his lightsaber still pointed at the floor, breathing hard as the pain began to filter back into his body. He looked up at Hrado and the Weequay woman, who had moved to her boss’s side when the shooting began. She had unholstered her blaster and was aiming at Anakin, but hadn’t fired yet.

“What were you saying about me not being any trouble?” Anakin said.

He was answered by the slow sound of Dooku’s clapping. Anakin didn’t know how much of the room had been projected to him, but it had clearly been enough. _“Well done, young Skywalker,”_ he said.

Anakin raised his lightsaber, pointing it at him. “You’re not going to win here, Dooku.”

_“You don’t think that you can really threaten me with that, do you?”_ Dooku chided, spreading his hands. _“I am, after all, not actually there.”_

“It wasn’t a threat,” Anakin said. “It was a promise. I’m not afraid of you.”

_“Foolish child.”_ He smiled slightly. _“Tell your Master that I’ll see her soon.”_

Anakin didn’t dignify that with a response, just slashed his lightsaber downwards across the base of the holoprojector, terminating the transmission. Dooku vanished in a shower of sparks that left Anakin’s lightsaber the only illumination in the room.

He felt rather than saw Hrado and the Weequay flee. Anakin started after them, then stopped as he heard a door slide shut, cursing under his breath. He wanted Hrado alive, but right now it was more important to get the others out. CSF had to know where Crimson Arrow had their den; it would be safer to go after them with a team of Jedi and a clone trooper escort, especially since they were apparently dealing with Dooku.

He only hesitated for a second, then stepped over the limp bodies of the guards towards Hrado’s desk. He found his utility belt and strapped it on, but Ina-Rati’s and Griaa’s weapons were nowhere in sight. He stuffed Griaa’s datapad into his tunic, since the last thing Senator Mothma needed was to have classified information sold to criminals, then poured a handful of datachips he found in a drawer into one of his pouches. Hopefully there was something interesting for the Temple techs to look at on them.

Lightsaber still ignited, he headed towards the turbolift. The power failure meant that it wouldn’t be working, but that was all right – Anakin didn’t need it. He just needed the elevator shaft.

He thrust his lightsaber into the doors and carved an opening large enough for him to climb in through, then used the Force to pull the durasteel circle out and toss it onto the floor behind him. Once inside the lift, he cut another circle into the floor, stamping his heel down on it to force the superheated metal to release. He listened to it fall, clanging off the sides of the shaft, until he finally heard it hit bottom.

He pulled a miniature glowrod out of one pouch before he deactivated his lightsaber and clipped it to his belt. He caught the glowrod between his teeth as he fumbled in his pouches for a moment before finding the length of weighted fibercord that he wanted. He wrapped one end around his durasteel wrist, then lay down on his belly to peer down into the darkness of the elevator shaft, holding the glowrod out in his free hand.

“Well,” he said, the words echoing in the empty turbolift, “this should be new.”

He straightened up, then sat down on the edge of the hole, legs dangling over several hundred feet of empty space. After a moment of hesitation, he deactivated the glowrod and put it away; the Force wouldn’t exactly let him see in the dark, but it would come close. Now in pitch darkness, Anakin took a deep breath, tightened his grip on the fibercord, and dropped like a rock.

He flung out the weighted end of the fibercord as he fell, using the Force to make sure that it wrapped around one of the turbolift cables and smacked back into the palm of his left hand. Still falling, Anakin swung towards the cable, clamping his boots down on it to slow his fall. Within seconds he could smell burning leather. He was still falling fast enough that the wind created by his passage ruffled his hair, but that was just the way he liked it. He let out a bark of delight that echoed through the otherwise empty turbolift shaft. The only thing that could have made this more fun would have been Obi-Wan here beside him.

_All right, if I was jury-rigging a prison out of a tenement building, where would I put the shield generator?_

All the way down. Anakin grinned. This was going to be fun.

He wasn’t walking wounded the way that he had been pretending, but he wasn’t exactly in tip-top shape, either. Still, he had fought with worse injuries in the past, and the pain of his bruised ribs and battered shoulders vanished in the exhilaration of freefall and combat, the Force boosting him up until he could get back to the Halls of Healing in the Temple. He was going to need to requisition a new pair of boots, though.

The building was new enough that it took him more than a minute to reach the bottom. As he slid downwards in warm darkness, Anakin sensed the life forms beyond the closed turbolift doors to one side of him. All of them were agitated, thrumming with tension in the wake of the power failure. Hope sprang out of despair on the part of the other prisoners – Force help him, there were dozens here, maybe more. How long had this atrocity been going on right beneath the Senate’s nose? There might have been Republic worlds where slavery was tolerated, legal or not, but not here on Coruscant, in the very heart of the Republic. Anakin was going to burn it out, root and branch, if it was the very last thing that he ever did.

He landed on the floor of the turbolift shaft with a light thud, sparing a moment to run the fingers of his left hand over the insteps of his boots. Yeah, he’d definitely need to requisition a new pair. Coiling the weighted fibercord back up, he replaced it in his belt pouch and ignited his lightsaber.

The superheated plasma blade cut through the metal like a hot knife through butter. Anakin kicked the durasteel circle aside and stepped out under the shocked eyes of several Farghul guards a little ways down the corridor, which was illuminated by the thin, artificial glow of emergency lumas. They must have kicked in when the power was cut.

“Hello there,” Anakin grinned.

“Oh, stang, it’s the Jedi!” They were raising their blasters. Anakin thrust his palm out, so that the first blasts went harmlessly into the ceiling, then closed his fist and twisted, throwing them into the wall. They slid unconscious to the floor. As Anakin passed them, he casually sliced through the barrels of their blasters, rendering the weapons useless.

He stood still for a moment, cocking his head to one side as he sought out the shield generator with the Force. There, behind that door. It was locked, of course, but he held his palm out over the keypad until he felt the correct combo click into place. The door slid smoothly open. Anakin stepped inside, deactivating his lightsaber and switching it out for a glowrod.

He had spent enough time working with shield generators that he could recognize all the major models on sight. This one was no exception. Anakin ran a hand over its surface, flicking open the cover over the control panel. It was maybe a decade old, probably purchased offworld as military surplus, but it had been meticulously kept up since then. It wasn’t hooked into the same power grid as the rest of the building, which explained why there wasn’t as much chaos on the building as there might have been under other circumstances. Reaching delicately out along the Force, Anakin found that it had been programmed with several redundancies that would prevent the ray shields from going down en masse, even if the central shield generator was damaged or destroyed. Backup shield generators on each floor, all with individual power cells, would keep them running for some time yet, though eventually they would run out of juice if the central power wasn’t restored. Anakin was pretty sure that he could do something about that, because he was damned if he was going to leave a single prisoner here to be sold into slavery.

He worked quickly, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he tried to figure out if there was some way he could change the shield generator’s operating instructions without having to get into the wiring or destroying each backup generator individually. In a distant, distracted way, Anakin actually admired the programming; he couldn’t have done better himself.

“Come on, come on –”

The Force hummed a warning against the back of his head and Anakin spun, his lightsaber leaping into his hand. Outside in the corridor he heard blasterfire – three quick, precise bursts. A moment later the sound of armored steps echoed on the ferrocrete floor.

“Jedi, is that you in there?”

It was the woman who had brought them water, the one called Yeine. “Yes,” Anakin said cautiously, his lightsaber burning in his fist. He still couldn’t sense her in the Force.

She appeared in the doorway. Anakin tensed at the sight of the blaster rifle that she was still carrying, but it wasn’t pointed at him. “You cut the power,” he said, understanding. “What are you, CSF? Spec Ops? Emerald Star?”

“No.” She gestured at the shield generator with the blaster rifle. “Can you disengage the backups?”

“I’m working on it,” Anakin said, but didn’t move, not wanting to turn his back on the woman. “What’s your name?”

“Yeine.” She said it quickly, without hesitation. Still, the Force shivered a little at the lie. Anakin frowned at her, metal fingers twitching on his lightsaber’s hilt. For some reason, his instincts wanted him to trust her, despite the fact that his brain was telling him that he didn’t know enough to make that judgment yet.

“Do me a favor,” he said finally. “Take off your helmet.”

This time she did hesitate, just for an instant, then she shifted her grip on her blaster and reached up to pull her helmet off. She was human, Anakin saw, with fair skin marred by the blotchy purple birthmark that covered most of her left cheek and nose, with black hair cut in a bob that skimmed her cleft chin and eyes as blue as Obi-Wan’s. He thought that she was probably about the same age as Obi-Wan.

She tucked her helmet under her arm and looked at him. “Is Hrado dead?”

Anakin shook his head. “He had a bolthole, just like every other rat I’ve met. Do you have any idea where he would have gone? The Council will want to bring him in.”

Yeine shook her head. “No, I don’t.”

Anakin frowned at her, but this time he wasn’t positive whether or not she was lying. It was a neat trick; too bad most Jedi Anakin knew would be unable to replicate it merely based on the fact they were far too strong in the Force.

At last he deactivated his lightsaber and hung it off his belt. Some days, you just had to make a call and hope it was the right one. “Watch the door,” he ordered. “I think I’ve nearly got it.”

He bent back over the control panel again, altering code and working around the redundancies, until something went _click_ in his mind. Anakin grinned in sudden fierce certainty, his fingers flexing over the keyboard, and hit the last key.

“Got it,” he said, grinning. He started to reach for his lightsaber again, then thought better of it and dug in his belt-pouches until he found a narrow roll of ribbon charges. If Obi-Wan found out that he had been wandering around Corsucant with explosives in his pockets, she’d lose her mind, he thought grimly, tearing strips off and sticking them to the generator. He felt a little like losing his mind himself, because until he had thought about it, he had completely forgotten that the charges were there. After a moment of searching he found a miniature detonator, no bigger than his thumbnail, and stuck it into one of the charges. He set it for thirty seconds, grabbed the glowrod off the top of the console, and motioned Yeine out of the room, flicking his fingers at the door to close it.

They made it to the end of the hallway, back to the fragile shelter of the empty turbolift shaft, before the explosion tore the shield generator apart, ripping through the walls of the room. Yeine shoved Anakin against the back of the shaft, dropping her helmet as she tried to twist so that her armored body was between him and the oncoming explosion. Anakin thrust out one hand beneath her protecting arm, the Force gathering on his fingertips. Anakin forced Yeine down, bending over her to offer what protection he could. Debris rained down on the shield he had created, sliding off thin air to pile at the base of the turbolift doors.

“I might have overdone it,” he said once the explosions had stopped. His ears were still ringing, so he couldn’t hear Yeine’s response, though from his scant ability at lip-reading he suggested that she agreed with him. He had always relied on the Force to tell him the surface thoughts of other beings, but his mind slid off hers like oiled glass.

“Stairs?” he mouthed at her, since the power was still out. He could probably have made his way back up the elevator shaft if he really had to, but he wasn’t looking forward to it.

She nodded. They stepped back out of the turbolift shaft, stumbling a little on the debris scattered across the corridor floor. The stairs were set off to the side, behind a door that opened when Anakin gestured at it.

Chaos echoed down through the stairwell, which was all the confirmation that Anakin needed to let him know that he had succeeded in rerouting around the redundancies, as well as letting him know that his hearing was starting to return. He could hear shouting in a dozen languages, as well as blasterfire and the sound of fighting. If there were guards on each floor, as Anakin had sensed on his downward journey, then they were swiftly being overpowered by the now free prisoners. He grinned in fierce, cold delight. It served the bastards right.

“Street entrance?” he asked Yeine. “Is there a speeder bay somewhere?”

“Street entrance to Level 786 is two floors up from here,” she said – a little louder than necessary, but she probably hadn’t entirely recovered either. “There’s a garage on the eighth floor that opens onto Level 785. There are usually a couple of speeders and swoop bikes there. You and your friends were being held on the sixth floor.”

Anakin glanced up at the stairs and winced, but started climbing as quickly as he could anyway, using his glowrod to light the way. There were a few emergency lumas floating around, but they were few and far between. The further that he climbed, the more intense the chaos grew, reverberating through the Force and making his head ache. He could sense that the two lowest floors were unoccupied, probably kept by the Crimson Arrow crew rather than used for more holding cells. Anyone there must have left when the power went out, either fleeing or to keep an eye on the prisoners.

Three stories up, Anakin was nearly run over by a stampede of beings pushing and shoving and screaming their way towards the street exit, vaguely hellish in the dim light cast by the few lumas and his glowrod. Anakin was flung against the wall of the stairwell, throwing out his left arm to keep Yeine in place. The contact, brief as it was – all he touched was her armor, not her skin – sent a faint shiver through the Force, giving Anakin a flash of an image: a reflection of red hair and blue eyes set in a face more familiar and dear to him than his own.

_Obi-Wan?_

He shot a startled glance at her, but she wasn’t looking at him.

The stairwell wasn’t going to get any less crowded the longer he waited, and he had to find Griaa and Ina-Rati. Anakin gritted his teeth and kept climbing, using the Force to clear a path. Men and women stepped out of his way without seeming to notice that they were doing so, letting Anakin and Yeine run up the stairs. They were in such a hurry to escape that they didn’t pay any attention to the Jedi Padawan in their midst. Knowing in painful, exacting detail what they had been expecting until the ray shields went down, Anakin didn’t blame them. He didn’t blame them at all.

He reached out through the Force, searching for Griaa and Ina-Rati’s signatures. Upstairs, still, both of them anxious and growing more so by the second. Anakin swore, dropping into Huttese for it, and increased his speed. He had to reach them before they tried to leave the building, since the last thing he wanted was to have to explain to Mon Mothma how he had managed to lose her favorite aide and to Obi-Wan how he had lost her sister.

Well. To be fair, he wasn’t entirely certain that Obi-Wan would actually care, given the sense of disinterest that he had gotten from her when CSF had first come to talk to them. Good Jedi didn’t have any emotional connections to their families; many Jedi didn’t even know who their birth-families were. Anakin had always assumed that she was in the latter category since she had never, in his memory, ever mentioned her birth-family to him.

Without warning, Yeine grabbed at his sleeve, drawing him down to her level so that she could whisper harshly in his ear. “Tell your partner that she might have to go home for this one,” she said.

“What?” Anakin said, startled.

“Tell Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Yeine said, enunciating the name, “that she might have to go home for this one. I’m sorry. If I’d realized that she was alive after all I would have found another way so that the Jedi didn’t get dragged into all this.”

Anakin grabbed at her arm, but she twisted adroitly away from him, so that his fingertips just barely glanced against her armor. “Why are you doing this?” he demanded.

She looked back at him as she stepped aside, grasping at the rail so that she didn’t lose her balance on the crowded stairwell. Her familiar face was shadowed in the gloom. “Because I love my world too much to bring this war to it.”

“What world?” Anakin shouted at her, but by then she was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the dialogue from Anakin's flashback scene comes from _Star Wars: Republic_ #59, "Enemy Lines", written by John Ostrander.
> 
> One of the major points of departure from canon in the Oxygen & Rust 'verse is mentioned in this chapter, which is that Shmi Skywalker is still alive, the Lars homestead wasn't the one attacked by Sand People, and Anakin never committed the massacre that occurs in AotC. This has its origins in a currently unpublished O&R fic that takes place a year after [Bad Moon Rising](http://archiveofourown.org/works/368762) ("the Obi-Wan and Padme road trip story", as I like to call it).


End file.
